


Curse of the Crimson Throne: Courtesan

by Isada



Series: Sexventures [1]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Pathfinder (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: 69 (Sex Position), Anal Sex, Anthropomorphic, BDSM, Bath Sex, Bondage, Candle kink, Crotch stomp, Demon Sex, Drug-Induced Sex, F/F, Fisting, Fivesome, Foot choke, Furry, Humiliation, Interspecies Sex, Magic Cock, Masturbation, Monster sex, Multi, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Oral Sex, Orgy, Other, Partner Swapping, Pegging, Porn With Plot, Ritual Sex, Sex Toys, Size Difference, Tail Sex, Tentacles, Threesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-02-24 13:10:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 24
Words: 49,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13214445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isada/pseuds/Isada
Summary: Based on Pathfinder's Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign comes...essentially the same campaign but sexed up to eleven.Spoilers: Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign adventure path (Pathfinder/3.5e)Spoiler spoilers: Death warning is not for the protags, not that kind of story.





	1. Four Queen's Maidens Sitting in a Tree

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Protags:  
> Maldrag, bisexual female half-orc bard, she/her  
> Varani, women-preference genderfluid half-elf sorcerer, they/them  
> Ran, aromantic pansexual agender merfolk mesmerist, she/her, they/them  
> Zellara, lesbian transwoman halfling oracle, she/her

Chapter 1: Four Queen’s Maidens Sitting in a Tree

Maldrag

The cows and pigs in the pens outside All the World’s Meat stopped their lowing and grunting at the beat of a lone drum in the night. The deep thrum resonated through the dark, empty shopfront, the meat locker littered with stained straw, and the killing floor abuzz with flies. It grew louder, faster, insistent with each step up the staircase. A shaft of light deepened and broadened with the sound as it passed from the hall into the second floor break room.

Four renegade guards and one young, shockingly handsome watch sergeant crowded around the back half of a round table laden with half-shuffled Harrow cards and warming tankards of ale. A powerfully muscled half-orc towered between them and the half-opened window. She had dark, olive green skin and a jagged butterfly tattooed to the back of her shaved head.

The drum beat silent. The half-orc turned on the balls of her feet, hands and corded forearms crossed over the drum that hung from her broad shoulders. Her hard, angular face shone under a light sheen of sweat. One hooded amber eye winked at her audience. Maldrag broke into a crooked smile.

The five leapt to their feet, whooping and whistling. Maldrag chuckled and took a bow. She helped herself to a sixth chair at the table where she reached across and snagged two fingers around the handle of the watch sergeant’s ale.

“Do you mind? Performing’s thirsty work.”

“No, please--shall I get you one of your own?” asked Sergeant Vancas.

“Not when I can drink yours.”

A couple of the cannier guards laughed. Despite his nobleman’s education, it took Vancas a second before he swatted his security out the door. He returned to a seat directly across from her. She slid the tankard around the cards and into his hands with a middle finger.

“You’re not how I imagined one of the Queen’s handmaidens would be.”

“Believe it or not, I wasn’t picked for looking like a war goddess incarnate.”

“What were you picked for?”

“Why don’t I show you?”

\--/--

Varani

A sprawl of light and sound marked the last pier of Old Korvosa. Glowing lanterns in the shape of dream spiders and god’s eyes hung from pilings and lampposts all seventy feet down to the five richly painted ships moored at its end. Short rope bridges and gangplanks joined the ships from deck to deck. Large signs painted in every language in the city directed carousers in various degrees of sobriety to their entertainment of choice:

“Welcome to the Goldenhawk—-No Safer Sleep Since the Stirge King’s!”

“Dragon’s Breath Corridor—-Dream the Dragon’s Dreams at Your Own Wallet’s Price!”

“The Twin Tigers—-The Harrow Says Your Luck’s in the Dice Tonight!”

“House of Clouds—-”

A tall, lean, and dishevelled half-elf stumbled out of the Clouds’s red-lit parlor with the scent of anise, rosewater, and cinnamon still thick on their deep olive skin and jet black hair. Their sharp black eyes roved with cat-like languor over the sailors, sex workers, nobles, and assorted drunkards dancing on the main deck of largest ship, the Eel’s End. Varani Carlo counted four enforcers in the rigging and three at the dance in an ambiguous state of not quite hiding nor quite partying but instead seeking out the least crowded corners and awkwardly tapping an armored boot to the music.

Varani meandered over the gangplank and into the thick of the dance, linking arms with the revelers and spinning them round. Each partner brought them closer to the stern and a large pair of double doors painted with a glassy dream spider.

The guards noticed. By the time Varani had broken away from their last partner, two guards were there to bounce them from the door. Varani only shot them a dazzling smile and whipped out a well-worn Harrow deck.

“The sexiest fortune-teller at the pier, reporting from the Clouds.”

“You’re the sexiest?” said the first guard without any mind to hide their incredulity.

“Friend, you wound me, but yes, that’s how I’m billed.”

“I didn’t think Devargo was into androgynous types.”

“Hey, I prefer women myself, but those bills won’t pay themselves--which this won’t either, by the way. I’m a new hire, so I gotta offer a free tribute.”

“I don’t remember that rule.”

“It’s new, like me.”

“Well, if it’s free…,” said the second.

The second passed through the doors to secure her an audience. The first leaned against them and continued to size up Varani, who only smiled brighter. The cards in flew in ladders and bridges between their hands.

The second guard re-emerged from the dimly lit room. They held the door open just wide and long enough for Varani to squeeze through.

Varani couldn’t see the walls for their layers and layers of cobwebs. And spiders. They laughed weak and wheezily, prying their eyes off the dozens and dozens of shadowy shapes, some as large as a fist, that scuttled between the layers of cocooning web.

Varani pulled their arms into a close hunch and hurried to the spider-free oaken table and chair at the base of a wooden stage. They could just make out the web-bridged silhouettes of a large leather chair and its tall, artfully slouched occupant. Varani recovered their most dazzling smile, bowed deep, and flourished grandly.

“The sexiest fortune-teller at the pier, reporting for duty.”

“At the pier?” laughed Devargo, rising from his slouch and his chair. “Aren’t you selling yourself short?”

“Thank you. That’s what I’m saying.”

Devargo, the purported King of Spiders, stepped into the light of an iron chandelier, dimmed and muted by webbing. He had the pale white skin of the Chelish immigrants but the blue eyes found in Varisians, his close-cropped black hair dominant among both. He dropped with lanky grace to a seat on the edge of the stage where he watched Varani spread a horseshoe of seven cards, facedown.

“This is some foreplay.”  
“Oh, you like this? Just wait until I give you the read.”

He snorted and a spider scuttled out from under the sleeve of his black leather armor down his arm.

Varani wheezed then cleared their throat. They closed their eyes and waved both hands just above the backs of the cards.

“Oh! Oh my! I’ve never gotten a message this strong before.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah! Why, it’s like I’m hearing it from the Queen herself.”

They flipped over the first card.

“Stop.”

The next.

“Doing. Business. With. Oh, two words--the Arkonas.” 

All the warmth on Devargo’s face froze over in an instant, but Varani, not finished, held up one palm from which dangled a crimson blade charm.

“Or. Else.”

\--/--

Ran

A permanent cloud reeking of brine and stinking of dead fish clung to the ex-and-interior of the fishery. Though technically decommissioned, a dozen or so children slept in hammocks below its catwalks, their hands, clothes, and hair stained with the day’s fish guts and slime. On the other side of the open bay, a massive, ten-foot-tall vat caked with tar leaked the worst of the stench from its slow-rotting slurry, a product sold as bait, fertilizer, or to the desperate as dock-dumplings. Beside the vat, a rickety, pockmarked staircase fed down to the fishery’s underbelly.

Though large, most of the space in the room had been taken by the huge hole over the river and shore. Pilings strung with mossy ropes rose from the thick, brackish water to support the ceiling. Its rusted, dangling manacles clinked over the water. Two reptilian eyes quietly broke the surface to watch the movement in the room’s corner with piqued interest.

Gaedren, its primary provider of chum and children, sat in front of his junk-littered table bound to a chair. A stranger, nude of all but a crimson charm necklace, bent at the waist in front of him. Her arms braced against the edge of the table on either side of Gaedren just close enough that they brushed him with every thrust from Gaedren’s second behind her.

Only Gaedren could see her mouth half-open with pleasure. Her smooth, porcelain face was as forgettable as any plate save for her large, almond-shaped eyes, both dark and luminous like lights glowing from deep below water.

The grimy fingernails of one hand dug in the soft flesh of her ass while the other clawed at her breast. Ran encouraged his almost desperate thrusting with soft cries. Her eyes trailed down Gaedren’s grayed chest to to the full erection straining the fabric his pants. She spoke at a volume just for him in an accent like the pull of the tide over coarse sand that neither of the men could possibly have placed.

“I want to suck you.”

“Yargin, get the fuck off her and untie me.”

“Aww, Boss--”

“Fucking do it or I’ll throw you in with Gobbles.”  
Yargin gave her a final, forceful stroke. She squeezed him as he pulled out, drawing a groan of reluctance from him, but he obeyed his orders like a good little lackey. Ran smiled fondly. 

While Gaedren fiddled with his belt and drawers, she guided Yargin to a seat with a light but insistent touch on his shoulder. She turned her back to him and placed his hands on the smooth, human curves of her hips. His grip tightened and he bent to kiss the place where her tailbone currently met the cleave of her ass. Before he could open and eat her, the weight of her gaze over her shoulder drew his head up.

“I need to sit to reach your boss.”

Yargin grinned ravenously and held her over the tip his still very erect cock. Ran bit her lip for him and slowly pushed herself down to his base. His growl turned to a yelp of surprise as she crossed her legs, locking him as tight as a knot inside her.

“Fuck in the Graves, Maiden, I almost came!”

“Then come.”

Merfolk couldn’t breed with humans, which was part of the reason Ran always received the messier jobs.

She placed Gaedren’s hands on either side of her head, and his bony fingers wrapped in her raw umber hair. She smiled up as she went down on him. 

Her body arked in a bridge between them, shivering from the grind of her own legs tight over her clit. Her exhalations grew more rapid and her shaking more violent as she rocked herself to orgasm. She pulsed and constricted around Yargin as her throat hummed with her groan around Gaedren. They came under her, uncontrollably.

“Fuck, fuck.”  
Ran uncrossed her legs but didn’t yet move off of Yargin. She let Gaedren re-adjust his pants before addressing him with a low tide of magic under her ragged voice.

“Kill your second.”

Gaedren’s eyes glazed over. He reached around and drew a rusty knife from the clutter heaped on the table.

“Boss? What the f--”

The blade whistled past her ear and sunk into Yargin’s neck.

\--/--

Zellara

In the cozy darkness of an erstwhile noble’s home, a stout and curvaceous halfling with dark brown skin and a head of black curls tiptoed from rug to brightly colored rug to avoid the blood running rampant on the hardwood. The final rug squished softly under her boots. She gagged. 

Her soft black eyes, abuzz with magic that allowed her to pierce the darkness, lit upon a tapestry beside a still-smoking incense burner mounted on the wall. The brocade depicted a black-skulled beast juggling humanoid hearts.

“Nobles,” sighed Zellara Soldad, “not a lick of good taste between them.”

She ripped the tapestry off the wall and flung it onto the red-slicked floor. As she neared the door, the frantic clang of alarm bells stopped her in her tracks. She took a deep breath and smoothed her clothes over the fine golden chains she wore draped beneath against her skin.

“This execution was by the order of the Queen of Korvosa. No, I’m a handmaiden of the Queen. This murder was a public service ordered by her and executed by me. No, no--”

From the other side of the door, steel clashed on steel. A cacophony rose up comprised of screams, moans, and a detonation of arcane power--none of it directed at Zellara.

“What a stroke of luck.”

She popped her head around the door and into the street. Many pillars of black smoke rose on the horizon. The voice of a Korvosan herald cut through the din: 

“The king is dead! Long live the--”

They were shouted down by a slew of angry cries to the effect of:

“Hang the Chelish usurper!”

A wing of griffon riders swooped overhead, angling toward Castle Korvosa at breakneck pace. One badly wounded mount splattered blood into the street. Zellara squeaked and ducked back into the foyer. A mighty, stone-crunching, bone-breaking crash shook the foundation of the house.

“I should really be getting back.”

She peered into the street once more. Fortunately, the eruption of fighting and looting would provide perfect cover. Zellara tiptoed out from behind the door as nonchalantly as she could. As soon as she’d passed the corner, she broke into a speedwalk.

Thundering horseshoes clanged against the cobblestone behind her. She flattened herself against the nearest wall. A contingent of mounted Hellknights charged down the street.

A deep, earth-shaking rumble issued underfoot. The street burst apart in a long fissure that devoured the screaming knights and horses with a belch of rock and sewage. A large, rounded creature the size of a carriage crawled forth from the breach on three tentacles, two tipped with barbs and one with eyes. The otyugh, cleaner beast of the city sewers, roared with the uprising.

Zellara inched backward. Its eyes rolled around on its tentacle to face her.

“Ah, fuck.”


	2. A Dark and Screamy Night

Chapter 2: A Dark and Screamy Night

Maldrag

Maldrag walked around to Vancas’s side of the table and drew his chair out with a single foot. He smiled expectantly, but she only patted his shoulder.

“Night night.”

Magic flooded out from her hand and went straight to his head. He hit the table snoring. She winced.

“That’s one way to make an egg.”

She tiptoed out into the hallway and down the stairs with her drum at her waist and her mark over her shoulder. The only thing missing was her beloved Nice-Ax, which she’d had to check at the shopfront. The guards had placed it on the wooden countertop along the back wall.

Maldrag laid Vancas egg-up over the bottom few stairs and crept toward the low haze of voices and cigarette smoke. The doorknob turned without a squeak, probably greased with some of the fat off the animal trade they’d monopolized in the slums. Needless to say, she wasn’t surprised when the door hinges didn’t squeak either.

The four guards stood looking out over the display cases, empty except for a few trapped flies, at the ramshackle huts across the street. The orange glow at the ends of their cigarettes matched the orange glow over the cityscape in the far-off direction of the castle.

“Probably having a party without us.”

“I would, too, if I were hot Chelish queen with a foreign country to squeeze dry while my grave-bait husband’s out cold.”

“I heard she can’t even speak Varisian.”

“What? So the royal tongue...is now Common?”

Maldrag might’ve laughed with them if she didn’t have her arm through the gap of door, grasping for the end of her greataxe. Her fingertips fell short by a good three feet. She held her breath and eased the door further into the shop.

“Anyone want some more ale? I’m about to--”

The three other guards turned at the first’s sudden stop.

Maldrag stood three-quarters through the door with her greataxe held aloft in one hand.

“I’m just going to get this for a little ax-play.”

It was the clothes. A drum could be kinky, but her untouched clothes were a dead giveaway. She could see it in their eyes. She didn’t stick around.

Maldrag couldn’t tell if the door closed behind her and didn’t care. She hurtled down the hall and threw Vancas over her free-hand shoulder, heated shouting hot on her tail. With a well-practiced flick of the wrist, she dropped her greataxe into the sheath on her back.

There were two doors out back. One reeked of blood. The other stunk of shit. She charged shoulder-first through the shit door.

Two pens caked floor to ceiling in manure assaulted her nose with physical force. Burning tears blurred her vision. She wiped her leaking nose on Vancas’s leathers and hopped the wooden fence into the outdoor pen.

The nauseating stench was only slightly less potent, tempered by mud and an equally strong animal musk. But the street was in sight, and she knew the slums better than any of those guards.  
Maldrag let out a mighty roar over the lowing cows and grunting pigs. Startled, they scattered to the corners of the pen. She ran to the outer fence, crossbow bolts thwacking into the wet soils at her feet. She grabbed the splintery wood and vaulted over, safe on the filthy cobblestone.

A blood-curdling scream pierced the night air of the pen behind her.

“Nope. Don’t do it. Keep walking,” she muttered.

A second cry followed, far weaker than the first. Maldrag looked back over her unoccupied shoulder.

All four guards had followed her into the pen. Three remained standing. Three full-sized boars backed them into a corner at the blunt end of their dinky, useless crossbows.

“Those idiots.”

She left Vancas passed out on the streetside and ran back to the pen. Her hands reached not for her Nice-Ax but for her drum.

\--/--

Varani

Devargo rose to his feet. Two trains of teeny, tiny spiders, hundreds of them, wound down his legs onto the stage. He stalked back to his chair, leaving the jointed, scuttling pile crawling over each other to stare at Varani with their beady little eyes.

“I’m not the only shiver dealer in Old Korvosa. I stop--someone else takes my place.”

“Ah, I should’ve been more clear. The problem isn’t the drugs. It’s your business partner. The one who’s out to usurp the throne? House Arkona? Ring a bell?”

Devargo slapped a hand over his face and laughed through his fingers.

“This is why we need a new ruler. Maybe even a new government. You work for the Queen? You can die with her.”

His other hand pressed the arm of the chair. The floor opened under Varani’s chair. They screamed and flailed, grasping at thin air. Until the hundreds of tiny spiders flung themselves down through the trapdoor with them in a cloud of spiders.

Varani hit the ground cursing, ass-first, and wrapped their arms over their head. The spiders landed on them with the weight of a light, spindly blanket. Electricity exploded out from their skin. The spider blanket fried, sizzled, and popped, mostly off of them. They stood to shuck off the rest of the splatter, which landed on a sticky, lumpy mass of webbing and humanoid bone.

“Should I even be surprised at this point?”

Against their better judgment, they touched their fingers to the crimson charm at the end of their bracelet. Light bloomed from the metal and down through the dizzying tunnels and twisting corridors in the room’s thick walls of cobweb. Some webs shimmered and danced in the light, reflecting oily rainbows in the silk.

A pair of eyes caught the light. As did four smaller eye groups of eight and one fist-sized group of eight.

Varani gulped audibly.

“How do you like my murder pit?” Devargo called down from above.

“I’m seeing signs of life, unfortunately, so I’ve gotta question it’s effectiveness.”

“I’m almost sorry I have to kill you.”

The trapdoor shut over Varani. Wheezy laughter babbled out from below the pair of eyes. Eight spiky, jointed legs as long as an elephant’s moved in the shadows clunking like clockwork over the bony, webby floor. It wound around Varani in a closing spiral.

Outnumbered and outmaneuvered, Varani was down to their last and dumbest option. They drew their sickle in their left hand. Their right hand tracked the un-ignorable clunking.

The elephantine spider, the elephider, stopped. 

Cold sweat slicked both hands. 

Bones crushed and snapped under its tensing legs. It pounced into the light, eight head-sized feet airborne.

Varani screamed. Twin rays of fire blasted from Varani’s open palm.

The elephider also screamed. Its mandibles, now aflame, careened a hair’s breadth from Varani’s head into a solid wooden support beam. Every connecting thread of web went up in rainbow smoke.

Two of the smaller but still terrifyingly child-sized spiders scampered deeper into the lair. The others, seemingly unphased by the growing conflagration, pounced on Varani’s legs. Their boot stopped the first bite, but the second dug its needle-length mandibles under their knee.

Varani choked out a single curse through the smoke and flung out their hand. Magic surged into the air around them. A wind kicked up and caught the smoke in its whirl, blowing it out in the direction of the wheezy laugher.

“Fuck,” they wheezed, retreating into the fleeting darkness.

The elephider didn’t give a fuck. Its arm-length mandibles broke through the rainbow whirlwind and chomped down over Varani’s arm.

Varani couldn’t hear themself screaming over the rush of burning poison it pumped into their bloodstream. They dropped their sickle and slammed their left fist between its largest, lidless eyes.

“Ugh!”

Fire burst from the hammer of their fist straight into the elephider’s head. It jerked its fangs out from the bloody punctures and screaming, recoiled in an unsteady scramble of limbs. 

The spiders on Varani’s legs only climbed higher to sink their fangs. The venom brought them to their knees. In reach of their sickle.

The crescent blade bloomed to life with a blue flame. Varani roared and slashed as best as their weakened limbs could manage. The blazing sickle managed the rest, cauterizing as it sliced both spiders in two. The sizzling remains fell on the other side of the spinning rainbow cloud now darkened to circus-like garishness.

Varani slumped back on their heels at the center of the whirling wind. They could see the giant, black outline of the elephider on its back only thanks to the ever-increasing strength of the blaze. Screams and sounds of panic slowly filtered down from above deck.

“Is this why Ran always sleeps with her marks? No, it’s gotta be.”

\--/--

Ran

The rusted dagger clattered to the rotting floorboards. Gaedren staggered back on his ass beside it as Ran rose from her seat on the old man’s partially decapitated second. She reached into her piled clothes for a waterproof pocket watch. Three hours left--plenty of time.

“What the fuck? What the actual fuck? Yargin was two-thumbs-up-the-shitter dumb but why the fuck would you make me kill him?”

Ran stopped mid-step in her pants.

“Oh...right. Sorry. The reason I was sent here is because Korvosa has had it with you kidnapping children, forcing them to work for you, and apparently murdering them?”

“Why the fuck would you fuck us if you came here to kill us?”

“It’s kind of the national pastime where I’m from.”

Gaedren fumbled for the dagger and scrambled to his feet. He pointed at her with the reddened stabbing end. Her schedule had accelerated.

“I want you to walk into the water.”

Gaedren jerked back as though struck.

“What the fuck did you say to me?”

She shrugged on her shirt and fixed him with the full force of her psychic gaze.

“Walk into the water.”

His eyes glazed over. The dagger swung loose from the end of his hand as he turned about face. With each step toward the hole in the floor, the long, toothed maw of the alligator within rose higher, shedding black, briny rivulets.

The psychic spell broke with the surface of the water under his feet. The stinking brine choked off his scream. His flailing limbs disappeared below the stilling waves along with the alligator’s tail. Ran dragged Yargin’s still warm corpse to the edge of the water in case Gobbles wanted seconds.

She padded to the top of the rickety staircase and across from the fishery’s great reeking vat to the catwalks. It was almost a pity that Gaedrin’s scream had drowned out. She had to wake the lost children herself. She tapped the shoulder of the nearest, who woke with a whimper and flinch.

“Don’t be afraid. My name is Ran, she/her, and I’m here to help you.”

The words worked their own kind of magic. The little one climbed around the beam into the next hammock and woke its occupant. The two worked together, systematically waking the rest of the children. They gathered behind Ran in the darkness where they held their breath and kept so still that she could hear the lap of the river.

They followed her out onto the boardwalk that wrapped around the sides of the fishery. Ran’s human feet threatened to slip out from under her on the rotted boards.

“One-by-one.”

She went first, creeping over a loading dock down below, to the far corner. The road laid in sight at the end of a mere fifty more feet of boardwalk. She beckoned forward the first child back at the opposite end. The second followed on their tail. The wooden planks creaked and groaned.

“Fuck,” Ran muttered in Aquan.

She flicked a finger at the second child.

“Wait at the corner,” she commanded in her quietest Taldan, the human’s Common tongue.

Half-starved and overworked, even the great distance between her and child didn’t impede her psychic hold. They did as commanded and only followed once the first had made it halfway to Ran’s corner.

As the fifth child crept over the loading dock, a string twanged from below, and wood knocked on wood. A crossbow bolt thwacked into the child’s arm. They slumped against the wall with a cry. The sixth and seventh children broke formation. They ran to the fifth over the whining, splintering wood. The boardwalk collapsed under them. Ran screamed with them. 

A crossbow-wielding gnome waited on the loading dock below between a flail-wielding half-orc over twice their height and a snarling, lathering dog. The sixth and seventh children crashed onto the wooden wreckage before the three. The fifth child landed in the river with a little splash, leaking blood into the water.

\--/--

Zellara

Zellara ran. There was nothing she wanted to do less than fight the monster that purged the sewers by means of its own digestive system. She zigged and zagged down short-cutting lanes and back alleys, but her legs were small. The three-tentacled otyugh gained on her with every turn.

Zellara panted harder and hoarser. She had to find a place to hide. She rounded the corner of a tavern. Too quickly. She staggered back under her own momentum and smacked face-first into a rioter at the edge of a mob.

“Kill the dandy!”

“Death to the Queen’s man!”

“Shove a golden pitchfork up his ass!”

“We don’t have one of them.”

With their attention on the nobleman, none of them noticed Zellara backing away with careful, steadied steps. They didn’t even notice the otyugh. It scooped up a large, mutton-chopped rioter in one spiked tentacle.

“Guys, I could use a normal pitchf--”

The mob turned in time to see the otyugh slam their compatriot into the side of the tavern. It screeched in triumph and threw its bloody trophy into the midst of the mob. They screamed and scattered in all directions. The otyugh grabbed up two more and beat them to the ground like sticks on a drum.

Two neither ran nor broke upon the cobblestones. One was the nobleman, bound and cowering in his finery across the street. The other sobbed over the body of the mutton-chopped rioter.

“Go! Get out of there!” Zellara hissed from the shadows behind the door of the emptied tavern.

On the very off chance that they heard her, they didn’t listen. The otyugh flung its red, pulpy prey from its tentacles and shook off the splatter. It advanced on the crying one.

Zellara ran screaming out from the tavern as far into the street as her legs would carry her. She didn’t make it to the crier and the otyugh, but she hadn’t planned to. She slammed both palms onto the street.

“Go, go shadow demon!”

Her magic drew the shadows of people, buildings, and lampposts under her hands, whispering their unintelligible secrets in her ears. The babbling rose to a deafening pitch. The shadows exploded out, transforming Zellara’s with them, into a ten foot ring around a broken pentagram.

A bloated black mass bubbled up from the jagged lines of shadow. A pinheaded creature took shape no taller than Zellara but easily twice as wide. It tipped back its full upper jaw and pointed skull and screamed with the ringing silence of the Shadow Plane.

Every eye on otyugh’s socketed tentacle blinked at Zellara’s little friend. Its shock lasted for only a moment. The otyugh charged on two tentacles, swinging its spiked third. The tentacle passed through the demon as though it were no more than a trick of the light.

With a jerk and stop, jerk and stop, the dretch’s jaw fell back into place. It held one meaty paw out to its side. Shadows arced from its palm into an overlapping pentagram on the ground beside it. A second dretch bubbled up with a silent scream.


	3. Get Out for Your Life

Chapter 3: Get Out for Your Life

Zellara

Zellara ran to the ex-rioter and ex-crier now frozen in fear over the mutton-chops and grabbed their shoulder.

“Get out! Go!”

The Korvosan staggered back onto their feet.

The two shadow dretches broke apart and launched themselves at one spiked tentacle each. They bit and clawed, but none of their natural weapons broke through the otyugh’s hide. 

One tentacle passed through the newer dretch, but the another slammed it down to the cobblestone and wrapped around its blubbery body. The eyeballed tentacle reeled the dretch in toward the otyugh’s toothy, seething maw.

The Korvosan managed to turn on their heel and run before the otyugh chomped down on one of Zellara’s only shadowy meat-shields. The nobleman, however, remained cowering in place.

“You too!” Zellara screamed at him.

“I would if my foot wasn’t stuck in some Groetus-cursed pothole!”

“Oh.”

Zellara grabbed the bolt of a small crossbow and crossed to his side of the street, giving the fight a wide berth. Her last dretch bit and clawed for all it was worth, but one of the otyugh’s tentacles managed to wrap around the solid shadow.

Zellara cut through the nobleman’s bonds with the piercing edge of the bolt. His hands and arms shook, but there was no time for first aid. She hooked her arms around his leg and yanked his foot from the pothole. He screamed.

“You broke it you fucking peasant!”

“Shut up,” she hissed, pointing at the otyugh munching down its shadowy, demonic snack. “Hold the wall and hop. I’ll be here to catch you.”

He braced his hand against the nearest building but looked around broken, burning streets in a panic.

“Hop where?”

“Castle Korvosa.”

Despite their slow pace, the otyugh didn’t go after them. It must’ve found something more interesting, like another crashed griffon rider. They passed several of those.

Zellara guided them through the tenuous safety of the shadows and even found hollows wrecked into ruined buildings in which to stop when the nobleman, Amin Jalento, needed a break. But he had called her a peasant, so she decided not to correct him when she was, in fact, a healer.

\--/--

Ran

Ran gathered her strength and flung her arm out at the gnome and half-orc. When she spoke, a magic echo doubled each word.

“Don’t move.”

She clenched her teeth and jumped down after the wounded child. The black waters bit like raw ice against her skin and she cursed in Aquan. A pair of eyes and rows of teeth caught the moonlight and gleamed as they rose up from the deep. Another splash followed from the side of the dock. The dog. 

She cursed again, snagging the child and their protruding bolt under one arm. The other arm pointed at the shark.

“You’re my friend, aren’t you?” she asked in the resonant tongue of aquatic beasts.

The gleaming eyes glazed over. Its jaws opened wider.

“Yes.”

“Then eat the dog first.”

A wave from the mighty sweep of its tail pushed Ran and the child back toward the dock. She rode the wave up to the surface. The child gasped and spat, but they breathed. The gnome and half-orc had obediently remained frozen in place.

Ran deposited the little one onto the dock and climbed up into the brisk night air. Her teeth chattered as she drew her dagger. She cut off the protruding end of the bolt in the child’s arm. The little one yelped but didn’t cry.

She stalked toward the dock guards. Her shaking hand cut jagged slits through their throats. She let them bleed out for the remaining seconds of the spell. When it ended, they collapsed into the water from either side of the dock.

She returned to the huddled child, who looked with wide and fearful at the wreckage of the boardwalk. They could see neither hair nor limb of either of the children who’d run, thankfully.

“Hold on just a little longer. I’m taking you to the castle. It isn’t far.”

“What about my friends?”

She held out her trembling, dripping hand.

“Close your eyes.”

The child snivelled and took her hand. She led them around the splintery wood and up the dock’s stairs to the riverbank where the first few waited. She went back up through the fishery to fetch the children who hadn’t fallen. Without any more fishery guards to fear, they followed her back with all foot-pounding haste but didn’t say a word.

Ran and the children left the dock with the waters churning under the moonlight.

\--/--

Varani

Varani couldn’t go forward and couldn’t go back. The entire deck seemed to have joined in the conflagration behind their whirling vortex of poisonous rainbow smoke. It was only getting hotter, and they would soon run out of air. 

Varani snapped their fingers. The support beam. If they couldn’t go up, they could simply bring the upper deck down to their level. They walked back toward the beam until it passed into the eye of their vortex with a sudden flare that singed the hair off their arms.

The beam, though wreathed in flame, remained a solid support. The planks above, however, had warped and blackened. Varani shrugged and pointed at the weakened wood. They had burned their way into this mess, and by Desna, they would burn their way out.

“Boom.”

An arc of flame shot from their hand to the weakened wood and blasted a ten-foot wide hole around the head of the support beam. Burning shrapnel flew into the night. The upper deck let out an ear-piercing creak and groan.

Varani ran and tumbled into the area of the hole as the unsupported section of the deck came down around them. A door from above painted with half a glass spider careened into the support beam. It stopped at an upward angle on a heap of collapsed planks. The angle left a span of over four feet between the top of the door and the deck above.

“Fuck!”

Varani grabbed their head in their hands. But they couldn’t die like this. Especially not when that shiver-dealing smartass got to live. They threw down their arms with a snarl and marched onto the door. They stuck one arm out behind them with their palm angled ninety degrees from the door.

“Let’s just get it over with.”

A five-foot swirling ball of wind exploded out behind them and launched them up the ramping door into the air. Varani screamed as they flew into the gap, but they kept the ball gusting up behind them. It hurled them up, up, and out of the hole. They went flying from the night air into none other than Devargo’s gods-damned reception room.

Varani tumbled onto their feet with the ball of wind on their heels. They rolled right up to the edge of the trap door. Their chair was gone, but the table remained.

“What do you know, my cards!”

Varani stopped just long enough to sweep them back into their pocket. Priorities momentarily appeased, they went off to the nearest window. They swung the whirling ball into the glass. It punched the tinkling shards into the sea before dissipating itself.

Varani winced at the glass crunch under their hands but climbed through the window and jumped off the side of the  _ Eel’s End _ . They splashed down into the dick-shrivelling, ball-sucking cold. They swam as far as they could away from the ship and toward the pier before coming up for air.

The entire ship sat wreathed in flame that belched out rainbow smoke over the dark water. Wood cracked like thunder over the roaring pyre of the  _ Eel’s End _ . The main mast snapped and fell. 

Screams slowly filtered in. They came from the pier. Everyone had evacuated. They ran toward the safety of the shore en masse, occasionally knocking someone off the side into the water with a shriek.

All in all, it could’ve gone worse.

\--/--

Maldrag

The taut skin of the drum beat under Maldrag’s palm. Rather than petering out, the rippling sound strengthened with magic as it pulsed out over the outdoor pen. The humanoid prey and semi-domesticated predators rose their heads alike. Maldrag grabbed the top bar of the fence, vaulting over, but the rhythmic beat continued to thrum from the heart of the drum.

She landed in a crouch and kept her knees bent. The boars snorted and grunted at her, but they hadn’t turned away from Vancas’s hapless security. She drew Nice-Ax in one hand and took a cautious step forward. She stepped again. The boars turned, grunting and pawing the ground underfoot.

Maldrag made the tiniest of shooing motions with her other hand. The guards didn’t move. She snapped her fingers at them under the thrumming current. That got their attention.

‘Get. Out,’ she mouthed.

They backed away without lowering their crossbows. One bumped into the fence. Spooked, they fired into boar buttcheek.

The boar squealed and wheeled on the guards. Its two fellows followed. The guards screamed and scrambled. Their crossbows dropped into the filth. The wounded boar tensed and coiled to spring.

Maldrag slammed her Nice-Ax down onto the wounded asscheek. As the razor-sharp edge touched flesh, the magic in the metal blunted the blade so it struck like a rod.

The boar leapt and yelled, driving tusks-first into the ground. Its fellows turned this way and that at the attacks from all sides.

Maldrag charged at the nearest with a mighty roar amplified to thunderous bass by the magic resonance in the air. The sound alone drove the boar off to the safety of the herd. The bruised and unhurt boars followed.

While she had them cowed, Maldrag stowed her greataxe and jumped over the nearest line of fence, same as the guards. She ended the magic beat with a shift of thought. The sudden silence rang in her ears.

She leaned back against the wood and looked across the street where she’d left Vancas. He was gone, possibly even carried off by the three guards.

“Yep. Great. Sure. Ok.”

Those ungrateful weapon-litterers had left nothing but a smoldering cigarette in the mud at her feet. She tweezed it out between her fingers and took an earthy, sighing puff. There was nothing to do but get her ass handed back to her at Castle Korvosa.


	4. Do Not Go Gentle

Chapter 4: Do Not Go Gentle

Castle Korvosa overlooked the city from a pyramidal hill at its heart. Ramps and stairways crossed and wound up the slanted faces of the courtyard to the courtyard proper in a ring around the fortress-citadel. Inspired by Chelish architecture, the black stone castle reached to the sky with clawed towers. Draconic gargoyles watched over all comings and goings from under the corners. Flying buttresses leapt from columns carved with the dragon battles of history.

But with fire in the streets, the Castle had been locked tight, bristling with pikes and crossbows. Nervous guards with their weapons drawn stopped Maldrag at the top of the courtyard.

“Do you need to see some identification?”

“Sorry, no. We’re just messengers. The Field Marshal says: ‘Don’t bother reporting to me. Go straight to the Queen.’”

“Right, can do, thanks.”

She moved to do so, but the guards hadn’t budged from in front of the dark wood door. She spread her hands, begging the question.

“The Queen is...in mourning.”

“Got it. Thanks for the warning. Don’t poke an eye out.”

She waded through them and the door to the wide stairs that curled to the third floor. None of the other Handmaidens were in the long, slate gray waiting hall outside the throne room, so she set her drum on one end of a shining, dark wood bench and laid on her back with her feet at the other end. Under the stained glass window, she folded her hands, closed her eyes, and shoved the memories of tonight’s failure out her ears. Or tried to.

Maldrag shivered at a sudden chill. She sat up, completely unrested from those mere seconds on the bench. The waiting room shadows had subtly but unmistakably deepened and darkened. Zellara’s black curls appeared over the topmost stair. The newest Handmaiden, flecked with blood and dust, sat down beside her.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“How’d it go?”

“Well, I mean, it’s done--a few less backstabbing nobles in the city--but I’m pretty sure everyone’s plumbing is gonna be out of order for a while. Oh my Graves, not that I was responsible that last part.”

Maldrag laughed. The husky sound echoed like the sweeps of a broom.

Water dripped at the end of the hall. Ran, soaked from head to toe, stinking of rotted fish and brine, took the bench opposite theirs. She rested her arms on her widespread legs. Her expression was unreadable, partially due to the fact that none of them looked her in the eye. They all knew that was where the siren kept her lures.

Varani staggered in last. Although similarly drenched and dripping, they were covered in soot and stank of sweet, fragrant smoke.

“What happened to you?” asked Zellara.

“Today I learned that spiders come in all shapes and sizes. And I hate all of them.”

Maldrag and Ran rose from the benches, Maldrag grabbing her drum. With Varani here, that accounted for all of the Handmaidens sent into the field. Maldrag rapped the back of her knuckles against the nearest ten-foot, dark wood door to the throne room. It and its partner opened soundlessly over a path of silk carpet under a vaulting and soaring ceiling. Kings and queens of ages past stared down at the four with stained glass eyes as they approached the Crimson Throne.

The metal chair sprawled to floor and ceiling with a web of black spikes. Stage-like crimson curtains draped down its back panels and out from its crimson-cushioned seat--both period appropriate and practical in Maldrag’s honest opinion.

The queen’s favorite Handmaiden, Sabina Merrin, stood behind the right arm of the chair. The dark-eyed, deeply olive-skinned Varisian woman was one of those rare beauties who could shit on a plate and half the kingdom would accept it as her dowry. Her red plate armor leaned against the cladding of an immense fireplace, having replaced it with the queen’s favorite crimson corset and a belt fitted with both a vaginal and an anal dildo.

She had Queen Ileosa Arvanxi’s white ass bent over the arm of the throne with her ankles in a spreader. A web of ropes dug into her arms and breasts, binding them in a harness. Her arms flailed helplessly in a belted sleeve behind her back, never rising more than an inch off her body despite her endless squirming. Every thrust banged her knees to the metal and ground her clit against the throne. The queen drooled into the seat, grunting like a pig in heat. Sabina slapped her ass and grabbed a handful of flesh but lifted her other hand off to wave at the other Handmaidens.

The queen raised her head, strawberry blonde hair parting around her knife-sharp nose. Her gold-green eyes met theirs and dismissed them.

“On’t stop,” she slurred through her ring gag in Common.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

Sabina took the queen’s ass back in both hands and banged her like a screen door in a hurricane. She came screaming.

Sabina slipped two fingers under the harness and drew the queen up where she could kiss the back of her sweaty neck. Her Majesty laughed weak and ragged. Sabina pinched her nipple and the sound turned to a needy whine. 

The queen, still impaled on her dildos, bucked against the belt with the last of her waning strength, but Sabina only laughed back. She loosened the gag just enough to slide it down from the queen’s mouth. The queen huffed but finally spared a moment of her attention for the attending Handmaidens.

“As you may’ve heard, my husband’s dead.”

"I heard,” said Zellara.

“Everyone and their grandmother’s going to assume it’s murder, of course.”

“Of course,” said Varani.

She spat a sticky lock of hair away from her mouth, but it plastered itself right back. Sabina tucked it behind her ear.

“It wasn’t, but Cressida will assign one of you to find a scapegoat.”

“Dead or alive?” asked Maldrag.

“Either, but preferably alive so we can give the people a public execution for catharsis and whatnot, and then we can all move on, and I can start repairing the damage my dearly departed wrecked on the Korvosan economy. Any questions?”

“No,” said Ran.

“Excellent. Then leave me to my mourning, but leave the door open a crack on your way out.”

They did as commanded. The sound of fucking followed them all the way to the end of the hall. They didn’t say anything until they reached the bottom of the staircase.

“The King is dead. Long live the Queen. This calls for shots,” said Varani.

Ran pulled out her pocketwatch.

“I have an hour and thirty minutes before my tail comes back.”

“Ok, that’s one. Ladies?”

Zellara threw her hands in the air.

“Shots!”

“Count me in,” Maldrag chuckled.

They followed Varani to the Three Rings Tavern, all three of whose eponymous ring-like windows had been smashed in during the spat of evening violence. The barkeep, Theandra, a middle-aged dwarf with dark brown skin and black hair in a three-ringed knot, continued to sweep the floor as they stepped gingerly through the half-hinged door.

“Only the barrels survived the riots and the looting.”

“Perfect! Then we’ll take the whiskey in shot form, thanks. Actually, if you don’t mind, I can help you with that.”

Theandra rolled her eyes and waved Varani through behind the bar. They returned with a tray of twelve shots.

“Three for starters, there you go.”

Zellara knocked them back as soon as Varani put them down. Ran set her pocketwatch on the tabletop and downed the first. Maldrag waited until Varani sat back down and raised their glass to the air.

“To the--Zellara, you’re a halfling after my own heart, but you can’t toast with an empty glass.”

Varani downed the shot in their hand and walked back to the bar.

“Theandra, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to solve our drinking problem.”

She waved them through.

“Maldrag, do you mind helping me with this?”

Maldrag and Varani returned with the keg in their arms. Varani passed Zellara’s three glasses under the spout without spilling a drop. The four clinked their first, second, or fourth shots.

“To the Queen!”

\--/--

Ran left with a terse goodbye at the height of their therapeutic inebriation. Zellara stacked the layers of empty shot glasses into a passing rendition of Castle Korvosa. Maldrag struck an idle but jaunty beat from her drum. Varani shook their limbs in a haphazard dance with both Theandra and her broom in front of the fireplace. The remaining shards of glass lit up the floor like a wooden field of fallen stars.

Varani ended their dance with a slide on their knees across the glass-ridden floor. They stopped at a second keg of whiskey, insensible to the blood, and ducked their head under the spigot. Zellara let out a low whistle.

“Lady Luck, Varani, maybe you’ve had enough.”

“Imagine an elephant.”

“What?”

“Picture it. In your mind. An elephant. It’s standing right in front of you.”

“Ok, an elephant.”

“Now turn it into a spider.”

“Ew.”

“Exactly.”

They ducked their head back under, but Maldrag hooked them around the waist. She dragged Varani in a full pout, arms crossed, and heels dragging, to an armchair opposite Theandra’s at the fireplace.

“Just cool your heels for a second.”

As soon as Maldrag sat back down with Zellara, soft snores erupted from the armchair.

“What a day, eh?”

“You can say that again,” said Zellara.

“I could really go for a bath.”

“Me too.”

“...would you like to--”

“Sex?”

“I was gonna say ‘take a bath together’ and then we could see how we were feeling after.”

“That’s a good idea, such a good idea.”

\--/--

Ran’s dark, teal-green tail snaked in undulating curves behind her, sending small waves rippling out into the ocean west of Korvosa. She lived eight miles off the coast in a Shoanti ruin that may well have been the top of the Great Pyramid upon which the Varisians had built their Castle Korvosa, but was now little more than an anchor for corals and kelp forest. By the time she’d swum between the carved and coral-bound columns that ringed their ‘open-air’ flat and into the heart of their kelp grove, Cinnabar was already preparing for bed.

Her fellow agender merfolk had stowed all of their clothes and Mantis armor in a stone chest. They wore nothing but a strong blade of kelp tied around their fish-pale waist to keep from drifting off in their sleep. They looked up at Ran’s approach, dark eyes alight and strawberry red hair billowing in a short cloud around their unsmiling face. Smiling was for the earth-walkers.

The two embraced. Ran’s partner continued to hold her at the waist as she removed her own gear and clothing.

“Long day?”

“Human children are so small.”

“No.”

The word left Cinnabar’s mouth in a tail-jerk reaction. They both knew that the killing of any species’s young was forbidden.

“The marks were fully grown but too old to eat.”

“There’s never enough time to eat on the job anyway.”

“True.”

Ran saved her dagger for last. She scratched two lines into the siren count on the wall of her stone chest.

“Ran, you’re almost a Scylla.”

“I’m three short.” 

Of three hundred. 

Cinnabar pulled her closer, closing the gap between her back and their chest.

“You’re achieving and it’s amazing. Would you like to celebrate? Or is it too late?”

“It’s never too late.”

Cinnabar slipped an anchoring length of kelp around Ran’s waist. They pulled the knot tight with their teeth.

In human form, Ran had a tailbone, an anal opening, and a vaginal opening. In her natural state, a short ridge of fin crested where her tailbone had been and all the openings between her legs coalesced into a single cloaca hidden by the pattern of her scales. Cinnabar reached behind as they sucked at her throat and smeared a dab of warm fish oil over the mouth of her cloaca. Ran gasped at the sudden heat and quickly did the same for Cinnabar before she forgot herself. The oil slicked with Cinnabar’s own wetness.

Cinnabar nuzzled down to their breasts. They took a nipple between their teeth as two fingers began to press and rub over the mouth. Ran’s fingers knotted in Cinnabar’s hair. Her cry pulsed the water around them as her mouth opened for Cinnabar’s fingers. Her walls convulsed around them. Her tail thrashed and twined with Cinnabar’s.

As soon as Cinnabar’s teeth released her, Ran curled her body around theirs and brushed a kiss over Cinnabar’s cloaca. Her tongue licked and teeth grazed the scales until their lips let her in. Cinnabar pressed their mouth to Ran’s lips to repay her torturous touch, but Cinnabar was weak to a warm tongue. Their nails clamped into Ran’s back to brace as their tail thrashed in Ran’s coils, the short ridges of their fins scraping her scales. The water pulsed and blurred with their cumming cries.

Ran came up licking slick and fish oil off her lips. Their eyes locked and she knew Cinnabar wouldn’t rest. Cinnabar grabbed her by the joint of hip and tail and turned Ran’s back to them. She whimpered greedily as Cinnabar curled two fingers snug through her mouth. Thus latched, Cinnabar turned their back to Ran’s, leaving their own lips helpless to Ran’s fingers.

Ran stroked them slow at first. The harder and faster and wetter that Cinnabar rocked against her, the deeper she drove. Their walls only squeezed her tighter, but Cinnabar didn’t stop bucking until the full blade of Ran’s hand plunged through them. They screamed cumming pulses and rocked their twined tails so forcefully that they impaled Ran on their own hand.

Ran could inhale only in shallow wheezes as wave after wave of orgasm shook her helpless flesh. Cinnabar laughed mercilessly. Their hand knotted to a fist, stretching her walls and folds to their limit. Ran, locked under Cinnabar’s fist, couldn’t move without raw pleasure spearing her up her spine and down her bound tail. Her one free hand grabbed at her kelp tether like a drowning sailor for dear life. She succumbed and succumbed and succumbed.


	5. The Morning After

Chapter 5: The Morning After

Zellara woke like clockwork at six in the morning wearing nothing but a sleeping scarf and her fine, gold body chains. She scooted to a seat at the edge of the bed and smoothed them down in the gray light of early spring. Maldrag snored behind her. She giggled and placed her palms together, thumbs on her sternum. Her limbs shook at the joints.

Her ligaments and tendons were weak, especially at the joints. The wear and tear of a single day’s work was enough to start their atrophy. Every morning, she healed herself and reset their condition. The magic followed cool and then warm and then almost itchy as the tissues rebuilt.

She hopped off the bed and tidied the clothes on the floor of the loft. Maldrag’s, she folded and set on the upturned crate that served as a bedside table. Hers, she put on. They were her only set and weren’t scheduled for a wash until the weekend, but they served their function, covering her and her gold.

Zellara walked around to Maldrag’s side of the bed. The planks creaking underfoot were enough to wake her. Maldrag yawned, amber eyes mostly swollen shut with sleep, and held out her arms. Zellara laughed and stepped just within reach. Maldrag hooked her around the waist and rolled. Zellara squealed as her feet left the floor. Maldrag caught her up in both hands and held Zellara aloft over her chest. The tension, but not strain, of Maldrag’s muscles travelled up her arms and straight to Zellara’s waist. Heat spread up from Maldrag’s hands to her chest and down between her legs.

“Desna damn it,” said Zellara. “I’m horny again, but if we don’t wake up now--”

“We don’t clock in until nine. It’s o’dark thirty out there. Come back to bed.”

“Wait, do you want to sleep or do you want to sex? Because if it’s just sleep, I’ve got some cleaning I could really be doing.”

Maldrag lowered Zellara until her knees bent on either side of her chest. Zellara walked her arms around either side of Maldrag’s pillow. She looked wide-eyed down at Maldrag. From this position, it almost seemed like she wanted Zellara to bring her crotch over her face.

“If we’re getting up, then I should probably get some breakfast.”

Burning blood rushed into Zellara’s face. She place her hands on the rough headboard and shifted her knees up over Maldrag’s shoulders, the backs of her feet pressed flat against her collarbone. Maldrag stroked and teased her through the thin fabric of her pants until her breath went short and shallow.

“Please. No more. I don’t. Want to cum. In my pants.”

“You want me to take them off?”

“Please. Please.”

Maldrag slipped Zellara’s pants down and pushed them back to her ankles. Zellara tried to kick them off, but she didn’t have enough range of motion from where she knelt to manage it. Her feet just flailed. Maldrag laughed.

“You just stay there. I’m gonna make you cum and lick you clean.”

Zellara swallowed hard. She was never this horny in the morning. Maybe it had something to do with--Maldrag’s tongue rawed her crotch, holding every thought hostage.

By the time that Zellara and Maldrag tromped down the stairs, the warmth of a cooking fire had steeped the main room in the scents of cinnamon and anise. Zellara lived in a squat, two-story house in Trail’s End, one of the poorer communities in Old Korvosa. The house itself was in desperate need of repair and gardening, Zellara’s self-assigned projects, but she rarely found the time these days. At the very least, she helped keep the well-used and sometimes jury-rigged furniture spick and span.

Zellara’s mom and her younger siblings froze in mid-demolishment of a pile of flat, fried. Her mom balanced her bread on top of her mug and clapped her powdered, greasy hands.

“Scram, kids. Mama’s gotta give big sis the big talk.”

Her little sister and brother shoved bread into their mouths and hands and ran out the front door. Zellara clapped both hands over her face.

“Mom!”

Her mom and Maldrag both laughed.

“Come on, Zel. I’d never embarrass you in front of your damn fine friend. Zel’s friend, do you mind if I high-five my daughter?”

“Only if I get a five, too.”

Zellara’s mom held up both hands. Maldrag fived her with gusto. Zellara barely managed to pry the hand off her face.

Dhatri, her mother’s current partner, walked in with a gently steaming kettle of water from the well. The genderfluid Shoanti, he/him, stopped. He spun on his heel, raven-black braids flying. Zellara’s mom reached back and snagged the back of his clerical robes, white and blue in the holy colors of Pharasma.

“Nope, you’re part of the family right now. You’re getting in on this.”

Dhatri turned back, a sheepish wince on his dark, ruddy brown face. Zellara couldn’t blame him. He was only ten years older than her.

Zellara grabbed two flatbreads, passing one to Maldrag. 

“Hey, nope, no need. We were just heading out. Thanks for breakfast, Mom.”

They, too, scrammed.

\--/--

A booted foot knocked against Varani’s own. Varani groaned, a parched, almost whistling sound, and flopped over onto their stomach. Even in their fractionally lucid state, they registered the crush of glass. They groaned again, weaker.

Theandra kicked them again.

“Get up, you weak-livered punk. I saved your table last, but I’ve gotta get sweeping before the nightshifters get in.”

Varani cracked their crusty eyes. A splitting headache cleaved their brain at the speed of the morning light. They hissed and dragged themselves deeper into the shadows. Of a different table.

Theandra shooed and swept at them with the broom.

“You’re gonna scare off the customers acting like some undead. Just get out of here, Varani. Don’t you have that job you’re always sticking up your high horse’s ass?”

“That is...not the saying. Either of them.”

“Out!”

The streets were in shambles, gutted from the undersewers up, their sun-baked clouds of shit-reek doing nothing for Varani’s headache. Not a single pane of glass had been spared the business end of a brick. Entire building walls had collapsed into heaps of rubble that diminished as small teams of looters scurried by. Most of the roofs that still stood continued to smoke up the sky. At least that blocked out the worst of the light. 

For what seemed like the second time in one long, and now murderously bright night, Varani stumbled back up the Great Pyramid. They waved at the guards, still bristling with pikes, but who didn’t stop them from heading toward the Citadel this time.

The mini-fortress off to the side of the gothic Castle Korvosa had been built in an entirely different style. It’s coquina-block walls of shiny, many-colored seashells stacked in a squat but solid tower overlooking the Jeggare River. A crimson flag flapped over the Citadel’s heavy log doors. It took two guards to open one for Varani.

“Maybe…”

“Don’t say it.”

“...you’ve got a fire hazard on your hands.”

“Gods damn it, Varani. That joke was never funny, and every time I hear it, I pray to Groetus I’ll be there to piss on your grave.”

“Me too, friend. Me too.”

Field Marshal Cressida Kroft didn’t appear particularly happy to see Varani either. The half-Garundi, half-Varisian’s black eyes glowered over her dark brown, steepled fingers. With her thick black hair fashionably half-shaved, Varani, the other Handmaidens, and the client all in her office had a clear view of the vein pulsing in her temple.

“You just missed the debriefing,” Zellara chirped.

“I’m rescheduling it for after your briefing with Sandones,” said Kroft, her voice brittle with restraint.

The name ‘Sandones’ pierced through the hangover just far enough to be recognizable without accessing any more useful information. A new, duller headache set in. Varani dropped into a chair next to Maldrag.

But Maldrag stood up. As did Kroft. The two left the office for some other, private briefing room. 

Sandones, a tall Shoanti with ruddy brown skin who cut a trim, athletic form despite their late middle age, sat in Kroft’s chair as though they belonged there. With their raven-black hair fashionably half-shaved, the two did have at least one thing in common.

“We’ve worked hard to understand you Korvosans, but the murder of Gaekhen, my only son?”

Gaekhen, son of…that Sandones, a Way-Keeper of the Shoanti who lived in Cinderlands northeast of Korvosa, the Clan of the Skull. Sandones had relocated their family to the city as part of a diplomatic-peace-negotiation thing. The situation couldnt’ve have been any worse.

“The Skull are calling for war, but I just want my son’s body back.” 

No, it got worse.

“He was taken to some place called the Dead Warrens.”

Varani had concluded far too soon.

The Dead Warrens were Korvosa’s largest graveyard, large enough to be also known as the Gray District. Pharasmin clerics constantly patrolled the place, being as rife with the undead as it was, but they rarely entered Potter’s Ward, the burial tunnels of the poor and the homeless. Which made it a perfect criminal hotspot for those who could afford to hire a necromancer and turn all the neglected undead into their personal, shambling bodyguards.

“He’d be taken to Potter’s Ward,” said Varani. “What’s he look like?”

“Gaekhen just turned twenty-one. He has...had a stupid thing for tattoos. He’d be covered in them--head-to-foot.”

“I’m really sorry for your lose.”

Sandones’s red-rimmed, pitch-black eyes locked with theirs.

“Me too, Handmaiden. Me too.”

\--/--

Kroft opened one of the creaky cabinet’s in the staff room’s mini kitchen. Rather than the old, dented kettle, she drew out a bottle of wine, Jeggare 426, and uncorked it with her teeth. She unceremoniously spat the cork into the kitchen sink.

“Don’t judge me--there’s no water. I haven’t bathed in forty-eight hours. You want a drink?”

The grease from Maldrag’s fried flatbread breakfast had resisted all attempts to swallow it down. She could feel it congealing down the back of her throat.

“Yeah.”

Kroft took a swig and passed the bottle down. 426 had been a stiff, stiff year. The wine cut through the grease straight to her chest. Maldrag whistled low and passed it back.

Kroft took another swig before leaning back against the countertop, muscled forearms crossing over her chest.

“The Queen tell you about the execution?”

“That it’s gotta happen before the coronation or there’s gonna be an even worse riot. Do you have any leads?”

Kroft sucked in both her lips and chewed silently. Maldrag reached for the bottle.

“You know why she had to assign this to you.”

She knew. She was the only one of the current Handmaidens who’d ever brought back any of their marks alive. Though she wouldn’t have counted this mission even if she’d succeeded.

“Who is it?”

“Trinia Sabor. Do you remember last week the Queen commissioned that no-name artist from the Shingles to paint the King?”

She remembered. Sabor had wound up doing less painting and more menage-ing-a-trois with Sabina and the Queen. It’d been for the best. Sabor painted about as well as a brush tied to a dick.

“There’s no way she’s the murderer.”

“We can’t rule out the possibility. Bring her back, and she’ll get a fair interrogation.”

The muscles flexing in Maldrag’s jaw made it difficult to shake her head. Kroft slammed her fist against the countertop.

“Gods damn it, Maldrag, I wouldn’t have put you ten miles near this case, but I don’t have the authority to tell that devil-rimming Chelaxian to fuck off.”

The force upset the bottle in the sink. Dark wine, red as blood, sluiced down the drain.

“Fucking waste,” muttered Kroft, setting it back up.

She wiped her hand on the sable pants of her uniform, but the stiff wine’s stain remained. Kroft sighed and looked up to the cabinets.

“Technically, the mission’s dead or alive. But. If anyone spotted Sabor walking around the streets after the ‘execution’ it’s as good as ‘dead or dead’.”

Maldrag cracked a crooked grin.

“Got it.”

Maldrag grabbed her drum off the breakfast bar and headed for the door.

“There’d better be a body on my desk first thing tomorrow!”

“It’s in the bag, boss.”


	6. Maidens on the Case

Chapter 6: Maidens On the Case

Sabor lived in Midland, 42 Moon Street, but nobody called the district that. It was a slum, a section of the city built so densely that the ground level never saw the light of day--a real mold problem, but most of the district activity happened far off the street level, so they called it the Shingles. Overhangs, laundry lines, and jury-rigged catwalks of rope and any solid wood available tangled upper floors and rooftops into one community clutter. Sabor’s flat was an old tenements, three stories up off the moldy streets.

Maldrag rapped on the paint-chipped door with the back of her knuckles. It screeched open on rusted hinges. Sabor, short blonde hair bedraggled and her deep olive face scuffed with dirt and paint, stood in a apron more paint than fabric, reeking with the tools of her day-job. Two fingers tweezed the paintbrush out from her mouth like a cigarette holder.

“You’re in luck, stranger. Sabor, she/her, favored artist of the queen, is in. How can I help you?”

Maldrag scooped up the chain of her necklace with the back of her thumb. The crimson blade charm dangled in sight.

“Handmaiden Maldrag here, she/her. I’m actually here to help you.”

Sabor’s face froze at the sight of the charm. Maldrag had no idea if Sabor had heard a word she’d said, but at least she opened the door, pointing stiffly inside with the wet tip of her paintbrush. Bright green spotted the ground. Somehow, telling Sabor that she hadn’t come to kill her seemed like it would only heighten the artist’s fear.

“I like your studio.”

The main room of the three-room flat, or one-room-two-closet flat, dripped with vibrant color from every corner and flat surface. Tilted easels made of found wood lined the walls and crowded the already tiny room to a narrow space just large enough for a grown human to lie down. Each held a painting on a stretched potato sack in various stages of progress, none of which had been finished.

Maldrag pulled a paint tin out from under an easel for a stool. The tilted easel fell forward. She caught it by the wet painting and propped it back against the wall. Her grip left two palm-prints on the strawberry-blonde border of a white smear (sphere?).

“Sorry. The Queen was looking good there.”

“Thanks. I was just about to do her eyes. Can I get you something to drink? Eat? Potato?”

“Water, thanks.”

“There’s no water.”

“Right, then I guess I’ll have the potato.”

As soon as Sabor shut the closet kitchen door, Maldrag hopped to a squat and duck-walked her way to the edge of the door. She looked under the crack. Sabor’s feet were there. They cast no shadow.

“Fuck.”

Maldrag kicked the door open. Sabor stood musing in front of a sack of potatoes. A draft blew through a single, closed window without disturbing a single mussed hair on her head.

Maldrag charged in and the illusion shattered. The window opened over the tangled rooftops of the Shingles. Sabor ran barefoot along a clattering gangplank.

“I’m not here to kill you!”

She disappeared over the ledge of a balcony without a single look back. Maldrag swore again and clambered out the window.

\--/--

Ran had never been to an air-breather graveyard before. The air was quiet here but somehow thick. It clung to her skin and seeped in through her ears and nose and mouth with a muffled satisfaction. Everywhere she looked, dirt piled high in deliberate mounds. Here and there, small stone houses spotted with mold crumbled into the weeds.

Zellara tugged Ran’s sleeve and hurried after Varani. Not that they needed to. The ground was wet but solid. It held their footprints and the tracks of the wheelbarrow they followed without a dent out of place. Ran joined them as they stopped in front of one of the smaller houses.

Varani slid a tiny, deliberate pile of dirt over a wooden door rotting in the earth. The wet planks had swollen, so it took Varani several tries to yank it open. Dirt and mold exploded up and into everyone’s hair and clothes.

“Ugh,” said Zellara.

“If you want to be a Handmaiden, you’re gonna have to work on that tolerance,” said Varani, “or lack thereof.”

“I can handle it.”

“Really. We’re about to go down into a catacomb made entirely of dirt and breath atomized mold and corpse. Good luck.”

Zellara looked from Varani to Ran, disgust and horror pulling her face in opposite directions. Ran could only offer a weak smile and a pat on the shoulder. As a water-breather, she regularly inhaled worse.

Glowing mold filled the dirt tunnels with a dim blue light. The damp, musty air shoved the stink of rotting flesh straight up their noses. Zellara gagged. Ran’s eyes watered. They followed Varani into a large room supported by four, ceiling-high piles of rock.

Humanoid bones caked with mud poked out from the walls. More piled out of pits along the east and west walls. The crumbly hole of a tunnel had been dug through the southern wall.

“Unless they lyed the flesh off this kid, I don’t think he’s here,” said Varani.

The bone pits clattered and shook as if in disagreement. Three pairs of skeletal fingers gripped the edge of the western pits. Three pairs of skeletal wings burst through those of the east. The winged skeletons, hauled themselves up from the pits by their wing claws, raining bones into the dirt.

“Ran, do your eye-fuckery!”

“I’m not a necromancer.”

“Zellara, you’re into black magic.”

“Shadow demons are a completely different monster group!”

“Desna-dammit, where’s the sexy hulk when you need her?”

Varani drew their blue-flaming sickle in one hand and held the other palm up to the wing-armed skeletons, each as large as a bear. Twin beams of searing fire blasted two of the skeletons. They fell back into the pits as flaming piles of bone.

“Stop atomizing them!” screamed Zellara.

She shucked a crossbow bolt into the nearest humanoid skeleton. It collapsed in a not-flaming pile of bone.

“All ash is clean ash!”

A second humanoid skeleton clawed at Ran. She turned its fingerbones on the edge of her dagger, but the force sent her staggering back into Zellara.

Zellara screamed. The crossbow thunked in her hands. The bolt went flying past Varani’s pointed ear.

Before Varani could manage anything but a death glare, the two wing-armed skeletons charged, claws swinging. Varani and Zellara dove in opposite directions, leaving only Ran. She screamed and ran down straight down the crumbly southern tunnel.

The tunnel shook down wave after wave of dirt as the two skeletals both forced themselves against the too-small mouth. Ran kept running, arms in, until the tunnel emptied into a room of splattering mud.

Water and earth flowed down the walls in dark rivulets. They’d collapsed the floor into a sinkhole except for a single dry island at the end of a stone bridge. Someone had left their rickety wheelbarrow there, parked against the wall. A pile of fully fleshed body parts reeked from inside. They’d also been left and for much too long.

Gaekhen, who’d been murdered under the excuse of last night’s riot, would’ve had a much fresher scent. While the reek could’ve easily masked it, Ran doubted that a necromancer, one who knew the dead better than her, would’ve mixed old and new meat. She stepped from stone to stone to check anyway.

The mud of the sinkhole gurgled and squelched. Ran stopped on her stone, looking down. The mud wobbled against the edges, but the stone itself kept still. She decided to stay on the safe ground until the sinkhole settled down.

The mud exploded. Heavy brown strands thwacked her face to foot. She could barely open her eyes.

“WARM FOOD!”

Two solid, rubbery tentacles shot out from the sinkhole at her leg and waist. They jerked her feet out from under her and into the air. Ran opened her mouth to scream only to choke on a mouthful of thick, gritty mud.

An otyugh half-sunk in the pit dangled her over the black hole of its mouth with its rows and rows of needle-like teeth. Ran spat and scraped the mud off her tongue as fast as she could.

“Mragh!”

The eyeballs on its free tentacle zeroed in on her head with a roll. Ran held her hands out to the tentacle.

“Pleh-please.”

Every eye in their sockets glazed over. The tip of the tentacle brushed her palms.

“Friend.”

“Yes. Please, put me down.”

The otyugh turned her back around and set her on the stone. Its coils loosed around her waist and leg, the tentacles slinking back into the mud.

“Thank you, friend. How long has it been since you had warm food?”

“Months.”

“Fresh food?”

“Months.”

It saved her the trouble of going through the wheelbarrow. She crouched down at the stone’s edge closer to her temporary friend. Its carriage-sized body shuffled three shy feet forward.

“Do you know where the one who brings the wheelbarrow is?”

“My other friend! He is not far. I can take you under the mud.”

Zellara and Varani weren’t going to like that, but it was the best lead they had. She offered the otyugh a grateful smile.

\--/--

Maldrag scrambled under a line of laundry blowing in the wind onto open rooftop. Clay tiles cracked and slid under her boots. She cringed, but she couldn’t stop unless Sabor did first. Sabor may’ve been a shit painter, but she won for artist most dedicated to cardio. The woman didn’t flag for a single step.

Sabor leapt across the rooftop to the next like an honest-to-Groetus assassin and clambered up a wonky tin drainpipe for Grave’s sake. Maldrag punched the side of the tenement and followed up after her.

“I’m here to help you, you fucking athlete,” she shouted.

“Of course you’d say that, you...tattooed hunk of...muscle,” Sabor shouted back.

She ran into a slide down a steep slope of roof. Tiles flew in all directions under her surfing feet. Sabor sprang off the slope with a predator’s precision, launching herself across a ten foot gap to the nearest balcony. She landed on the balls of her feet and threw Maldrag two birds before scooting down the narrow line.

Maldrag slid, tripping over bare patches between the tiles. Her arms windmilled wildly, but she couldn’t miss the jump. She threw herself with all her might. The slightest turn out of place would’ve fucked with her angle and she’d gone full skew.

Maldrag shot into the open air past the balcony. She fell screaming. Her flailing limbs thwacked a bare, near-invisible laundry line. It snapped under her force. She hit a second. This time, she managed to keep her grip. 

The line snapped and swung her shoulder-first into the tenement wall. Maldrag grunted but immediately dragged her arms down the stone, grasping for anything while the rough rock ripped her to shreds. One hand struck metal. Sweet, sweet drainpipe.

Her hand clamped down around the metal and swung her leg around the corner. She squeezed and slowed to a full stop. Maldrag burst into a giddy laugh that echoed up and down the vertical shaft of tenement. A flock of disturbed pigeons flew up around her on their way to quieter skies.

Sabor’s head poked over the side of the highest rooftop.

“You’re still alive,” she shouted.

“And so are you. Because I didn’t shoot you. Which would’ve ended this whole thing ten minutes ago back in your flat. Can we just go back, start over, hash things out over a potato?”

“Fine. But those things take a long time to cook.”

“It’s cool. We’ve got until daybreak to get you out of Korvosa, but you can pretty much consider yourself banished.”

“Right. Better banished than dead. Need a hand there...Handmaiden?”

Sabor snorted a laugh despite herself. Maldrag chuckled back.

“Yeah. Come down here, you parkour painter.”

Maldrag slid down the pipe to the cool, moldy streets in the tenement shadows. Sabor threw a leg over the side of the roof and hooked the pipe. She followed Maldrag to the ground, wiping the red on her arms off onto her apron.

“Let me see your arms.”

Maldrag held them up at the elbows. Sabor winced but didn’t recoil. She straightened up and held both hands out.

“May I?”

Maldrag placed her palms on Sabor’s. A cool rush of healing magic flowed into her, easing the sting and leaving her skin tingling. Her eyes met Sabor’s.

“Thanks.”

Neither moved their hands. Sabor bit the corner of her lip. Her face flushed with more color than Maldrag had seen through the whole chase. The adrenaline pumped back into her.

She stepped forward, fingers lacing with Sabor’s. Sabor stepped back, pulling Maldrag with her. Maldrag pushed her against the tenement, wrists to the wall, mouth on her neck. Sabor stiffled a gasp.

“Do you want me to stop?”

Sabor shook her head without a word. She raised the head of one knee to the undercurve of Maldrag’s breast. Maldrag grinned and shifted in closer.


	7. A Friend in Me

Chapter 7: A Friend in Me

Zellara

Zellara looked dubiously at the otyugh half-sunk in the mud pit. It wasn’t attacking, true, but its promise to take them through the mud to see its ‘other friend’ sounded like a trap either to a) drown them in mud and eat them like some delicacy of sewage cuisine or b) bring them to the ‘other friend’ for whatever dismembering death had befallen all the body parts in the wheelbarrow. Varani, standing arms-crossed beside Zellara, appeared to have their doubts as well.

Ran, at the center of the stone step bridge, raised her elbows off her sides. Mud slurped. Two tentacles tipped with spines slinked up through the mud. One coiled around her waist, the back of its spined head against hers. The other came up under her legs so they bent at the knees. The otyugh carried her to a seat on the ridge over its closed mouth. She waved at them.

They waited to see if that was the last thing she ever did. It was not. Varani shrugged and sighed.

“Works for me.”

The otyugh carried them up and set them beside Ran.

“Your turn,” Varani called out through cupped hands.

Zellara paced the few inches her stone step permitted. They couldn’t force her to go--well, Ran could, but she wouldn’t. Would she? Zellara kept pacing.

Ran pulled out her pocketwatch. Of course, whatever spell of friendship she’d worked on the otyugh wouldn’t last. Zellara could either ride the sewer monster through the mud or wait around to fight them in it. She shuddered, shut her eyes, and ran down to the center of the bridge.

“Do it quick while I’m not looking.”

A thick, rubbery tentacle wrapped around her waist. Zellara’s squeak grew to shriek as it lifted her feet into thin air. She grabbed her sides, pressing the gold chains into her skin. 

Mud squelched under her butt. Zellara sat beside Varani on a waxy, filthy hide over warm, solid muscle.

“Hold your breath,” said Ran. “And don’t let go.”

Zellara squeezed her eyes shut and flung her arms around Varani. Cold, gritty mud rushed up to meet her. She couldn’t help it. She had to scream. But no sound could make it past the wall of noxious soil that surged down her throat.

The otyugh jerked to a stop. Varani tumbled off its face, yanking Zellara with them. Zellara thunked and sunk into the rank, watery slope of a pit. She slid down, coughing and hacking out mud.

She freed her nose and mouth only for the rancid stink of shit and decay to burn down and turn her stomach. Zellara vomited onto the heap of moldy straw on the pit floor.

A foot moved under the straw.

“Guys,” Zellara whisper-shouted.

Varani stopped climbing the wet wall of the pit, oozing an inch back down to the halfway point. Ran, followed by the eyeballed tentacle, popped her head over the pit mouth. The foot, belonging to neither of them, moved further from the vomit puddle.

Zellara warily cleared the straw with her foot. The foot attached to a leg attached to a bare, intricately tattooed torso, which fortunately still had both of its arms. There was even a head, human, and similarly tattooed.

Varani pumped their fist in the air.

“He’s alive!”

“Not for long,” said Zellara.

Gaekhen had sustained a massive whack to the head and multiple scratches. The open wounds weren’t deep, but in this disgusting fuck-nest of germs and disease, decay had set in. He was cold with shock and Zellara would’ve bet her chains his skin had already begun to discolor, but it impossible to tell with all the ink.

She touched him with one hand, muttering a word of healing for his head, and beckoned at the Ran and tentacle with the other.

“We’ve got to get him out of here, now.”

His breathing eased under her magic, but his skin remained cold and clammy. 

One spiny tentacle came down for Gaekhen. The other came for Zellara. It lifted her up into an even worse stinking cloud--shit and decay mixed with a sickly-sweet chemical concoction that burned its cloying taste into the back of her throat.

Saws, pliers, and long stitching needles glinted from shelves and benches along the dirt walls. Shockingly, they’d been organized. Two sturdy wooden tables at the center of the room each supported a seven-foot tall humanoid...patchwork of parts from different bodies.

Their mismatched feet twitched.

“Please stay dead,” Zellara whispered.

The two patchwork people lurched to an upright seat. Their eyelids peeled back over two rag knots, a shiny black button sewn over the center of each. Their jaws fell slack. Two hoarse, death-rattling wails escaped their throats.

“Put them back,” said Ran.

The otyugh lowered Zellara and Gaekhen back down to the shithole.

“No, no, no!” said Zellara, arms flailing wildly.

Varani hauled their upper body over the side of the mouth of the pit.

“What--”

One of the patchworks, running, tripped over Varani. They both tumbled down with a shout. Zellara screamed and flattened herself to the wall. Varani landed on Gaekhen, knocking the air from his lungs and probably breaking a rib or two from the sound of it. The patchwork landed on Varani’s arm. They screamed over their crunching bone.

Zellara shucked a crossbow bolt straight through the patchwork’s temple. It wailed and writhed. Varani screamed a litany of curses fouler than the reek in the room.

A bolt thunked into the base of the patchwork’s skull and another into its heart as it lumbered up to its feet. The patchwork staggered, trampling over Varani and Gaekhen, but never went down. Ran’s fish pale arm pointed down into the pit.

“Warm food.”

The otyugh screeched in ear-shattering delight and snapped the patchwork up in a tentacle. It threw the undead up in the air and caught it by the ankle, hammering it down onto the ground. The patchwork burst at the seams. Rotting flesh splattered everywhere.

Zellara and Varani screamed. Zellara had the benefit of being able to turn her back to the fleshy rain. Gristle landed on Varani’s face.

“Fuuuck! Fuck my arm! Fuck you and your otyugh, too!”

The otyugh didn’t give a fuck. It gobbled up one mashed patchwork after the other, chewing them both at the same time in its giant maw.

Zellara waited for Varani to calm down before offering to heal their arm. They accepted with shockingly ungrateful grumpiness. Their mood didn’t improve in the slightest when the otyugh finally pulled everyone out of the pit.

“Hey, we did it. We can go home. Bathe.”

“I would, if there was any water.”

Varani seemed quite happy with their attitude, so Zellara decided not to mention that her community in Trail’s End kept their own cisterns.

\--/--

Ran

The otyugh ferried them back to the bridge and sinkhole. Varani grabbed Gaekhen’s ankles and waited. Ran shook her head. She pointed to her eyes then to the glazed eyeballs on the otyugh’s tentacle. Varani quirked an eyebrow but jerked their chin at Zellara.

“We’re getting out of this shithole. Get his shoulders.”

Zellara threw her hands into the air.

“I’m three feet tall! We’d literally be dragging his ass back to the castle, and he can’t risk any more infections. Ran...you’re not coming back with us?”

“You go on ahead.”

The same nature that made the otyugh monstrous also made them innocent. Ran couldn’t leave them enchanted. She stayed silent on the bridge while Varani and Zellara switched places and carried Gaekhen out between them. The otyugh watched her wave goodbye.

“You are nicer than my other friend. Can you stay forever?”

“We’re friends today. Tomorrow, we won’t be friends.”

“No, you are my best friend.”

Ran smiled sadly and ended her enchantment. The otyugh’s many eyes cleared. They stared at her. A tremble ran from the base of their tentacles to the tips. The entire chamber shook with their wail.

“You’re not real!”

The otyugh’s tentacles flumped into the mud. It opened its mouth wide to the cavern, crying with abandon. 

As Ran watched, the shock of the spectacle faded and left her with a dull ache in her human heart. She placed a finger to her lips and whispered soft sushing.

The otyugh quieted though glassy tears still shone over its many eyes.

“Let me be real with you for just a moment.”

She undid the buttons of her mud-drenched shirt. It fell heavily behind her feet. Her exposed skin prickled and stiffened in the cold but free air. She stepped out of her boots and worked her wet, clinging pants down her legs. She fell back kicking the last foot free.

The otyugh’s wide, solid tentacle wrapped under her, keeping her out of the mud. She hugged the protective coil between her arms and her legs. It was firm but fleshy and warm, so different from the scaled coil of a merfolk’s tail.

The otyugh set her back onto the stone of the bridge. It held its many eyes aloft. They watched her wide with curiosity.

Ran knelt at the edge of the stone. She spread her knees and touched two fingers to her vagina. She beckoned the otyugh with strokes and cries.

The otyugh climbed out from the mud onto the dry island, knocking the wheelbarrow of body parts in. They shook the mud off their waxy hide like a dog. The wet dirt splattered everywhere, coating Ran. She wiped her face, tasting earth, rot, and water.

The otyugh scooped her up in a single tentacle and carried her onto the island. Their second spiny tentacle pressed against her skin and wiped the dirt off in broad strokes, brushing every curve. She squirmed noisily in their grasp.

The otyugh set her down on her feet but kept the one tentacle wrapped firmly around her hips and waist. She leaned into them, resting her elbows on the tentacle. A fourth tentacle snaked out from between the otyugh’s three legs. It was as thick as a human forearm and studded with many dark green bumps.

Ran looked up at their many eyes with all seriousness.

“I’ll need to be very, very wet if you want to put that inside me.”

“I won’t hurt you. Not ever.”

“Fine, then you can try, but if I say ‘stop,’ that’s it.”

“Ok. I will be listening to you.”

Reassured, Ran beckoned them forward with a single finger. The tentacle at her waist slithered further up her body. It pulled her arms over her head and held them there. 

The otyugh peeled open their giant maw. Their massive tongue tapered to a hot, pointed tip that traced over the nipples of her exposed breasts. As she twitched and twisted under their teasing flicks, the otyugh’s second and third tentacles each coiled around one ankle.

The otyugh picked her up and stood her over their mouth, tentacles supporting her locked feet. The tongue slid a hot trail down her front, tentacles pulling a gap between her legs. Their broad tongue tasted Ran’s clit, lips, and ass in a single, slow lick. 

Ran shuddered and groaned. The tongue came back for her again and again until its hot, tapered tip stopped under her ass. The otyugh’s many eyes watched her face as its wetness brushed her puckered hole, questioning. She shut her eyes but nodded them onward.

“Yes.”

Their tongue wet her and pressed her, wet her and pressed her, until her arms and legs shook uncontrollably in the coils that held them taut.

“Please,” she panted.

Their tongue pierced her hot and slick and solid as shit. She wheezed and shuddered around the weight and burning heat forcing itself up her asshole. Then it moved inside her. Ran’s body went completely rigid as it ran her through. All the strength left her knees and her head dropped back, rocking in time with the otyugh’s thrusts and the cries they pounded from her lungs. Her vaginal slick ran like urine down her legs. She came from her ass onto their tongue.

The otyugh laughed as they pulled out of her. They laid Ran down on the stones of the bridge, knees resting up. Her ass and empty, empty vagina still twitched with pleasure. She crawled unsteadily onto her trembling hands and knees, breathing hard. Ran turned her ass to the otyugh no different from a bitch in heat. 

The otyugh fondled her ass, lips, and clit with their tongue as it retreated. She gasped at the sudden, physical loss of weight and heat. Her upper body sank to the ground, breasts crushing between her and the stone, her body bent into a begging triangle. The otyugh’s hot breath prickled her slick, cooling skin.

“Can I cum inside you?”

“Yes, just come back. Make me cum again.”

A single tentacle squeezed between her legs. Ran’s pulse pounded in her ears and she let out an involuntary squeal of laughter. The tentacle coiled around one thigh and lifted her leg like a dog’s. 

Her breath hitched as the hot, blunt head of the otyugh’s penile tentacle nudged her dripping lips. She was ravenous but the otyugh only knocked at her doors. She pushed back up onto her arms and growled at them over her shoulder.

Her feral growl turned to a mindless shriek as the head crowned into the mouth of her vagina. She rocked and jerked on her wood-rigid limbs, but the tentacle held her firmly in place. The otyugh pushed slow but unyielding into her shaft. The girth of their dick forced her walls to their limit, their many bumps riding every fold. Her shaft squeezed and clenched, desperately trying to force their dick into a comprehendible shape, but only succeeded in wracking her body with mind-breaking orgasm as the otyugh filled and filled her.

Ran shook on the end of their dick as the otyugh laughed. She barely had any sense to spare the tentacle they laid down her back. The otyugh squeezed her shaking thigh, and screwed her down and over their dick to face them. Their second tentacle supported her as she convulsed, back bowing into a taut bridge. The long tentacles each coiled up and down her bent, rigid legs. They locked her spasming hands in coils against her ankles. Ran could only whimper and wheeze. Tears, snot, and saliva ran down the sides of her gasping face.

The otyugh’s eyeballed tentacle plunged into her open mouth. Eyes pounded the back of her throat as the otyugh’s coils tightened around her arms and legs. They dragged Ran down and up and down the impaling tentacle and its merciless bumps.

The tentacle suddenly jerked out of her mouth and into the air, eyes wide. Her consciousness drifted up from her wracking cunt just enough to register the echo of footsteps. The otyugh scrambled off the island, plunging her body still sheathing its dick into the mud. Ran held her breath against the pleasure still tremoring up from where the otyugh had trapped her in its coils.

“Rolth.”

Their vibrations of their speech travelled straight from the otyugh’s cock to her core.

“Where’s my wheelbarrow, trash humper?”

“I...ate it.”

The otyugh’s guilty gulp turned to a guilty squeal. Burning hot cum burst from every bump on their dick. Ran’s spasming cunt dragged her consciousness back under and every word lost its meaning. She devolved into violent, bound writhing. Her lungs couldn’t hold her in her scream. Her mouth opened on its own. She screamed into the earth, rot, and water and swallowed their diseased filth down.

\--/--

Maldrag  
Maldrag came grunting and squirted into Sabor’s mouth. She didn’t take her fingers out of Sabor’s cunt or her tongue off her clit until Sabor shuddered out one final, ragged cum. Maldrag hummed, pleased, and gave Sabor’s raw, swollen lips a quick kiss before pulling herself off her crotch. She crawled around to lean over Sabor’s panting grin.

“Hey.”

“H-hey yourself,” Sabor lisped, tongue numb.

Maldrag’s mouth brushed from the dip between her neck and collarbone up to corner of Sabor’s bruised, other lips. She licked up her own cum before tugging the end of shirtsleeves that bound Sabor’s wrists to the end of the drainpipe.

Sabor stayed back to the street as she shook and rubbed her arms. Maldrag sat beside her, brushing the sweat-plastered blonde strands out of her eyes. She helped Sabor to sit up against the wall when she was ready.

“I think you killed my legs.”

“That’s me, leg assassin,” she said, tossing Sabor the rest of her clothes.

Their laughter filled every shadowed corner of the moldy alley. It was the only sound in the streets. Maldrag scooped Sabor up in her arms and carried her back toward her flat. Sabor lit up a cigarette and took a long drag. She breathed the smoke over her shoulder and just as politely offered Maldrag a turn. Maldrag shifted Sabor into one arm and took a drag without stopping.

“Hey, can I ask you something?”

“Only if get to ask back.”

Sabor nodded, sending ripples through the smoke rising from her nose.  
“What would’ve happened if the Queen had really sent a Handmaiden after me?”

“Normally, you’d be interrogated, but nobody wanted you innocent, so you would’ve been tortured until you proved them all ‘right.’ Then executed. Publically.”

“Lady Graves.”

“Yeah. My turn.”

“Shoot.”

“Did you do it?”

Sabor stiffened in Maldrag’s arms.

“What the fuck? Why would you ask me that?”

“Why didn’t you say ‘no’?”

“No! Fucking no!”

Sabor said nothing else to Maldrag for the rest of the walk back. Instead, she piped like an angry chimney in her arms. Maldrag set her down just outside her door. Sabor staggered but made it in on her own by leaning heavily against the wall. There was no need to remind her to get out before tomorrow.

All that remained was for Maldrag to pick up a substitute body from the Grey District, a booming market thanks to all the disgruntled, aspiring necromancers in Korvosa. But as she left the slums, she couldn’t help wondering if she should’ve checked Sabor’s house for evidence before letting her go.

\--/--

Varani

Varani and Zellara carried Gaekhen through the broken streets and up the Great Pyramid straight to the royal chapels. There was one for Abadar, the boring but perfunctory city god of walls and ditches, one for Pharasma, the somber lady of graves, Desna, lady luck, the one everyone in their right mind worshipped, and a chapel under construction for old Asmodeus, the archdevil king of Hell. No, he wasn’t even a god, but the Queen had brought his worship over from Cheliax so now there was that abomination.

The clerics of Desna in their blue and white robes swarmed and flitted around the Handmaidens. They took Gaekhen away on a stretcher and brought Varani and Zellara for health inspection into an office with star-shaped holes for windows carved into the stone. The clerics disinfected them and mended Varani’s broken bones, but set them up in a sling as their arm would be tender for the rest of the day.

Zellara returned to Kroft at the citadel, but Varani took their sling as ‘doctor’s orders’ and remained in the chapel. They dozed on one of the soft-pillowed benches in the hall outside of Gaekhen’s room. They meant to wake whenever Sandones came running. They woke when someone pushed their legs off the blue cushion to take a seat.

Varani jerked up in a spidery flail of limbs and sling. Sandones caught their hale arm with a stare of mild alarm. Varani cleared their throat and sat upright. Both turned their backs flat to the cool, steady wall.

“Thank you.”

“We really exceeded expectations, didn’t we?”

Sandones shot them a side-eye from the side of their face.

“Right, sorry, too soon. Listen, I just wanted to...it isn’t much, but would you like me to read your Harrow?”

“Your a fortune-teller?”

“The sexiest fortune-teller at the Eel’s End pier.”

“I heard that was destroyed.”

“Yeah, maybe, I’ve lost track. Do you want a reading or not?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

Varani, having already scooted to the blue cushion at the opposite end of the bench, had plenty of room on the white middle cushion to lay down the cards in a five-point star spread. They turned over the first card and let out a low whistle. A rolling desert buried a mighty stone sphinx in its sandy waves--not an auspicious beginning.

“Guard your health. Something is coming, something you can’t survive alone.”

Dark, spiky armor completely covered a figure holding a book in one hand and a torch in the other.

“Keep your own counsel. Someone wants to influence or, ah, deceive you--not me.”

A stern dwarf wielding a hammer beat up a flurry of sparks on their anvil in front of a roaring forge.

“Right, so, keep your own counsel but also seek your friends. You’re going to face this trial, together.”

A giant red ant in a shining crown plucked a bunch of grapes from a banquet table.

“Watch out for...those in charge. They favor the powerless.”

An empty throne--that was awkward. Varani and Sandones looked up and immediately away. Varani scooped up the cards and sent them flying bridge and ladder style between their hands with a comforting series of thwips.

“That was dumb. Maybe don’t mention that to anyone so I don’t get my Harrowing license revoked for chicanery or something.”

“You need a license to read the Harrow?”

“No.”

“Yeah, that was dumb. Thanks. It was good to meet you, Varani.”

Sandones stood with a nod and returned to Gaekhen’s room. Varani remained outside in the quiet hall for a long time, thwipping the cards back and forth as their eyes bored new holes into the wall.


	8. Ding Dong the King Is Dead

Chapter 8: Ding Dong the King Is Dead

Zellara

No one but Maldrag seemed surprised when Kroft handed them invites to the Queen’s joint execution and ascension to queen regent garden party when they came into work the next day. The party was scheduled for that afternoon in the vast courtyard of Castle Korvosa itself with a brief move to the much more public bridge to the Great Pyramid for the execution at dusk, and all followed by a ball in the grand throne room itself. Despite the short notice, Zellara couldn’t imagine anyone missing the party. In fact--

“As the Queen’s Handmaidens,” said Kroft, waving off her own, unwashed stink with a hand, “you’re all required to the be there. I’ve already prepared your dress uniforms.”

Four mannequins stood in the corner with a single uniform tailored to each of their personal size, not taste. A short, gauzy crimson cloak covered their heads, bare shoulders, and blades like a veil of red mist. The top was a corset-like sheathe laced at the back that v-lined to the hem of the fitted, sable-black pants. The shiny black ankle boots laced up the side over a high, crimson heel. They’d definitely been designed by a noble. 

Zellara’s fine, gold body chains would be visible, but with only nobles in attendance up top and anyone who might know her all the way down under the Great Pyramid’s bridge, it wouldn’t matter. She took her uniform with the rest of them and rested up in the staff room until the afternoon. There was no sweeter sleep than that of paid nap.

A warm, strong hand shook her shoulder. Maldrag. Varani and Ran were there too, leaning against the walls of the break room in their functionally impossible uniforms. The back of Maldrag’s fingers lingered at her shoulder.

“Are you ready for this?”

Zellara was not. Without a drop of water to spare, it smelled like some had bathed in perfume instead and others, alcohol. She’d never seen so many circus-chique gowns, animal-unfriendly capes, and jewelry shiny enough to reroute shipping lines. And she’d thought their uniforms/costumes were bad.

A quartet in the corner played easy-listening over the bubbling fountains and lilting conversation. Maldrag sat on the ground beside them and, grinning wryly, would provide the occasional emphatic beat of her drum. Varani leaned against the wet bar with a cocktail in each hand and a line of empty shots behind them. Ran drifted at the edge of the crowd, hovering at the mouth of the bridge. The headsman’s block stood empty and ominous over the crowd slowly gathering in the streets far below.

“Not a lick of good taste,” she muttered, heading off to the buffet table.

“Oh, look, it’s one of the working class.”

The high-pitched titter stopped Zellara dead in her tracks, cringing. Nobleman Amin Jalento, formerly of the broken ankle, stood on one side of a couple in matching half-masks, one shaped like the sun and the other like the moon. A gold-skinned elf stood on the other side, their face painted entirely white except for one black spot over their mouth and a black teardrop at the corner of each eye. Only Jalento refrained from laughing. He was too busy giving Zellara the stink-eye from within his cloud of perfumed stink.

“Wait, wait, wait,” said the clown-chique noble, their Varisian crisp and overly-syllabic with the Elvish accent. “Amin, you know this one?”

“Not by name.”

“Dear Desna, we should rectify that at once. I am Lord Ausio Carowyn, he/him,” said the sun-masked noble, making an exaggerated bow, “of the Carowyn candle fortune. This is my lovely wife, Olauren, she/her.”

The moon-masked noble made an even more exaggerated curtsy, hiking the slit of her midnight blue sheathe well up her tattooed thigh.

“And this is our new friend, Jolisti, they/them,” said Olauren, hugging the elf’s shoulders. “We and Amin just met them last night but they were just so very quaint--we had to have them for our collection.”

“Collection?”

“You know what they say. Every noble is cut from the same silk cloth--”

“--but each prole makes a unique stain,” finished Ausio.

“Sorry, I just remembered I’ve gotta--”

“Oh but you haven’t told us your name.”

“Oh look, it’s the Queen!”

Zellara ran off to the buffet table as fast as she could and dove under the silk tablecloth as discreetly. None of the nobles had deigned to drop a single hors d’oeuvres but that was just as well. A roiling, cold-sweating nausea had completely consumed her appetite.

\--/--

Ran

The Queen finally made her appearance only five minutes before the sunset execution to a quartet-drowning herald of trumps. Twelve peacocks paraded down the castle stairs. They parted to either side of the courtyard, revealing the Queen behind their fanning tails. The mouth of every noble gasped as one. 

Queen Ileosa Arvanxi’s skin-tight silk was not crimson but a sky blue that shimmered and darkened like a living thing as she moved. Sabina stood on her right in muted gray armor. Though she wore no helm, her face was as closed as a visor. On her left stood a figure in dark, fitted red armor and a mask shaped like the head of a red mantis that completely cocooned their head and neck. 

Ran aimed a small, private smile at the pin-straight grass. She could smell the sea and sand from here. Cinnabar.

The music faded to the beat of a single hand against a drum. A group of guards fanned apart to reveal a prisoner in dirt-stained rags with a sackcloth bag over their head. The guards marched them to the headsman’s block in time to the beat. 

The Queen, Sabina, and Cinnabar, followed by the most blood-curious of the nobles, marched out onto the bridge behind them. The crowd below roared and surged as far as they could up the near side of the Great Pyramid.

The procession stopped at the foot of the block. The guards removed the bag over the prisoner’s shorn head. Their face was caked in tear-streaked dirt that they were almost unrecognizable as a human. The guards forced them to kneel, their neck in the blood-stained groove. The crowd screamed and the nobles tittered.

The Queen raised her arms. Silence fell over the whole city.

“Fellow Korvosans! You have suffered greatly these few days. Homes have burned, family members have entered Pharasma’s fold, fortunes have been lost. I feel your suffering. Not only have I lost a beloved husband, but with each riot, each burning home, each act of Abadar-blaspheming anarchy, my heart bleeds a little more.  
“Yet now our torment is at its end. Before you is the face of your anguish and pain. I offer you all the cleansing death of this assassin as a salve against the hatred and hurt you have suffered. Their death will not rebuild Korvosa, nor will it bring back the king, yet tomorrow will come a new dawn--the dawn of a city ready to rise above the edge of anarchy, to crush it with a strength the likes of which this world has never seen.  
“We usher in this new dawn with the hand of justice.”

The Queen pointed a single finger at the prisoner.

“Off with their head.”

Cinnabar stalked up the platform not to the beat of the drum but to the beat of a hundred thousand hearts in unison. The sea of skin prickled as the razor-sharp teeth of their sawtooth sabre scraped a line through the wood in their wake. They stopped at the block, the snick of their gauntlets to the handle heard over the watchers’s single held breath.

Steel flashed in the last light of the sun. Red arced and dove over one side of the bride. The head tumbled over the other. The crowd rose up to meet it.

Nobles stampeded onto the bridge, pushing and shoving for the best view of the roaring, seething crowd. They tore threw the head in seconds. The nobles seized the body and threw it over the edge. They screamed in giddy terror as the crowd spared the body no less violence.

The screams and laughter hadn’t stopped by the body’s end. Half the nobles headed back to the courtyard to eat, drink, and be merry. The other half stayed on the bridge to be violent. They tore off each other’s clothes and filled the dusk with their stinking sex.

Metal boots clinked against stone behind Ran. She stepped back, the knuckles of a gauntleted hand brushing against her tailbone. She sank into Cinnabar’s crushing metal embrace. 

Her masked partner pulled Ran’s pants down to mid-thigh, the fitted fabric forcing her legs as close as a tail. Ran gasped and squirmed as the cold metal pressed against her lips, but Cinnabar kept her steady, pinned to the executioner’s cuirass.

“Cin, the rail.”

Cinnabar’s giddy laugh echoed dully inside the mantis head. They shoved her onto the rail and laid heavy over her. Ran whimpered over the dizzying swarm of colors below. The rough, unyielding stone ground into her pubic bone as the metal rubbed, a biting tease on her clit.

“You’re wet,” the Mantis echoed at her ear.

“When we get home, I’m gonna--”

She grunted as two armored fingers shoved inside her. Her body went rigid and her cunt tight with the cold.

“What were you gonna do?”

Ran shuddered and wheezed in the grip of metal and stone.

\--/--

Maldrag

Maldrag never left her spot by the bubbling fountain, sitting cross-legged around her drum. She did turn away from the bridge once the nobles stopped worrying about their stench and started loving. At least the water only reeked of chlorine.

Field Marshal Kroft dropped down into the grass beside her and took a swig straight from a bottle of wine. She genuinely reeked. Maldrag took the bottle as soon as it was offered.

“That ‘Sabor’ looked pretty alive to me.”

“I know.”

“Who were they?”

“Some poor fuck from debtor’s prison.”

“Debtor’s prison? There was nobody else they could’ve killed?”

“Maybe, if your fellow Maidens weren’t so justice-happy.”

Fair point.

The silk tablecloth of the buffet table flickered in the corner of her eye. Zellara, eyes wide and veil dishevelled, poked her head out from under the table. Maldrag waved at her. Kroft raised her bottle at Zellara. In the seconds it took Zellara to crawl over, Kroft had drained bottle and was tapping the bottom for the last few drops. 

“How do you like the party?” slurred Kroft.

She plunged the bottle into the fountain and held it under the chlorine water.

“I hate it, thanks.”

“Crawl with me,” said Maldrag.

They left Kroft bathing fully clothed at the fountain for the relative privacy behind a topiary.

“What happened?”

“Nothing, I just--have you ever met a decent noble?”

“Never.”

“I don’t get it. Is it the money? The power? The privilege?”

“When you’re at the top of the pyramid, anyone below is gonna look like an ant. You wanna get out of here?”

“We could go back to my place. Take a bath.”

“I was thinking we could raid the bar and buffet first.”

Zellara’s eyes brightened for the first time since they’d gotten to the goddamned execution party.

\--/--

Varani

Two hours into the evening, Varani broke off from the raging orgy to recharge at the bar. Leaning against the countertop in a sharp suit with a thin flute in hand was Sandones. Varani scooted their loosened corset back up over their pecs.

“Sandones.”

“Varani.”

“How’s…,” they started before they realized they couldn’t for the life of them remember the name of Sandones’s son under present circumstances, “life?”

“Gaekhen’s recovered. I’ll be taking him back to the Cinderlands tomorrow.”

“Look me up when you’re--you’re not coming back.”

“The Clan of the Skull is formally withdrawing our diplomatic presence for the time being.”

“I can’t say I blame ya. Damn. This is goodbye.”

“It is.”

Sandones raised their flute. Varani clinked it with their shot glass. Both down their drinks. Varani pulled the bottle of whiskey up from the other side of the bar and refilled both glasses.

“What’s this?”

“Liquid courage.”

They clinked their glass to Sandones’s. Sandones took a single, perfunctory sip and looked on in bemusement as Varani drained two more shots. They whooped and shook out their arms, wiping their sweaty palms on their pants.

“Right. Sandones, can I offer you a goodbye orgy?”

“You mean this one? This execution-induced fuck-fest?”

They really, really couldn’t blame the Shoanti for withdrawing diplomatic presence.

“Nevermind. That was--”

Sandones set their fingers down between Varani’s. The brush of heat tugged a dizzying jolt up from their crotch.

“Pick somewhere else, anywhere else, and we can fuck.”

Varani pumped one fist and snaked the other around Sandones’s waist, pulling them hip to hip.

“I’m gonna make you squeak like a chewtoy.”

“Barbarians. All you Korvosans are barbarians.”

“Is that a ‘no’?”

“No. Let's see if you speak true, fortune-teller.”


	9. Something in the Air

Chapter 9: Something in the Air

The good news was that they’d got the sewers working again about a week after the execution. The bad news was that the overfull channels slopped their shit all the way up Varani’s rubber-suited thighs with each squelching step. There were also countless blockages. The Maidens should do more community service, Kroft said. It would improve their image, she said.

“Bullshit!” Varani said, before succumbing to a hacking fit on the visible, throat-pickling shit fumes.

Their feet slipped as they hunched forward. Varani windmilled their arms. They kept slipping. They had no choice but to slap their palm to the mottled tunnel wall. Shit squelched between their fingertips.

“Gah!”

They hadn’t fallen, but neither had they drowned and permanently shirked this duty off onto Ran’s shoulders alone.

The channel forked ahead. Varani could follow the oozing sewage into a rough-hewn stone tunnel or a bricked tunnel as thick with shit smog above as it was with liquid shit below.

“Yeah, no.”

The rough-hewn tunnel opened into a rough-hewn cave around a sludge pool whose stinking fluids trickled through a crude channel in the western wall. Varani teared up as they brandished their shit-stirring stick, a retractable ten-foot pole, and marched through the fat black mushrooms and other fungi to do their godforsaken duty.

A piercing shriek jerked Varani to a stop. Their boots slipped out from under them and their shitstick clattered to the ground. Varani hit the slimy algae butt-first. A large purple toadstool trembled at the foot of the pool and continued shrieking, rising and falling and rising in pitch like a shit-eating alarm.

Varani whipped out their sickle and hacked the toadstool straight down its meaty, phallic bulb. The shrieking stopped, but the room didn’t fall back into silence. Four hunched humanoids covered in fur and studded leather crawled out from the crude channel and up the rough-hewn walls, long, naked tails snaking behind them.

“Queen’s Handmaiden Varani here, I’m just trying to help you clear your shit.”

A four fanged, rat-ish faces hissed at her. 

“We don’t recognize no queen, pooper scooper. You’re trespassing in colony tunnels. You’ve got til the count of three to get out. One. Two.”

Varani got to their feet and cracked their neck. So much for community service.

\--/--

Maldrag sat on the edge of Zellara’s bed and spread her legs. Zellara watched wide-eyed as she pushed one head of the lubed up dildo between her swollen lips. Maldrag looked up at Zellara, mouth spreading in a wicked grin.

“The other end goes up your ass.”

“I’m gonna be skewered.”

“And screwed. Truly, deeply screwed.”

Zellara laughed nervously but approached anyway, a moth to a flame. She crossed naked in front of the skylight, and her sweat caught the moonlight better than any jewelry. Something deep and feral tugged behind Maldrag’s sternum.

“You’re beautiful,” she growled.

“Thanks,” Zellara giggled into her hands.

She hopped up on Maldrag’s knee. Maldrag nuzzled the nape her neck and hefted Zellara up in the crook of one arm. Her free hand guided the second head of the dildo under the halfling’s little puckered hole. She used the head to rub and smear the lube on and in her entrance, pressing her ear to the back of Zellara’s ribcage to feel every vibration of her panted whines.

“Maldrag, please, I need it.”

Maldrag pinned Zellara’s soft, slick back to her chest and hooked one arm under the halfling’s legs. Zellara squirmed and kicked the air as Maldrag pushed her onto the head. Maldrag put a hand over Zellara’s mouth and shushed in her ear.

“Listen, listen.”

Maldrag slid her down. The lube squished between the rubber and the tight skin of her hole. Zellara’s head lolled back against Maldrag’s bicep with a low groan in her hand.

“You’re not allowed to cum yet, Z. I haven’t even started pumping.”

Zellara shivered and whimpered like a starving bitch.

Crashing wood pierced the charged silence. Zellara jumped in Maldrag’s lap and landed back on the dildo with a guttural squawk, shaking as she came. Maldrag, already on the balls of her feet, slid Zellara and the dildo out from her lap. Zellara’s knees collapsed under her, but Maldrag caught her by the arm and eased the other head of the dildo out of her ass with a soft pop before Zellara unintentionally impaled herself.

They threw on their armor, grabbed their weapons, and snuck down the stairs, Maldrag supporting Zellara on her arm. Zellara’s mother and Dhatri crouched at the couch in their nightrobes. Zellara’s little sister laid out on her side, her breath shallow and strained. Dark red splotches covered her face and arms. 

“Brienne?”

She erupted into a violent fit of hacking coughs but never woke. Dhatri held up a wood-carved holy symbol of Pharasma, a spiraling comet, from the end of his rosary.

“Easy, easy.”

The wooden comet glowed with a pale, bluish-light light, briefly coming alive. Brienne’s breath eased with a deep sigh. She rolled onto her back and sank into the threadbare cushions with a slight upward curl at the corners of her mouth. Dhatri’s face remained grim. He motioned for them to follow him into the kitchen.

Dhatri put a kettle on the stove. Maldrag and Zellara’s mother leaned against the countertops with Zellara sitting on the counter between them. Her mother draped her nightrobe over her daughter’s shoulders, bare except for the leather armor.

“Brienne’s been completely cured of her illness, but it’ll take a few days before she’s back to full strength.”

He spooned an herbal mixture smelling of cinnamon and anise into four small mugs.

“To boost your resistance. The truth is, I’ve never felt an illness like it.”

“She was fine at dinner.”

Whatever this new illness was, it moved fast. It moved at the speed of a plague.

“We need to find the source,” said Zellara.

“Tayce, if it’s alright with you, I’d like to look through Brienne’s things in case there are any traces.”

“Of course.”

“We’ll help,” said Maldrag.

Dhatri gave her and Zellara a small, tense smile and tapped his mug.

“Safety first.”

Every second that they waited on the kettle’s whistle, the silence grew heavier. The diseased air grew harder to breath.

\--/--

Ran couldn’t get her head in the game. The sewer fumes were as thick in the air as the fog in her mind. Cinnabar hadn’t come home after the execution party. The Queen assured her that the assassin was simply on a mission, but it had been over seven days since she’d seen her partner. In the pit of her gut, she feared that the Queen, so frank and open, lied as freely to her trusted servants as she did to her disdained subjects.

Then someone shoved a bag over her head. A sharp whack to the gut cut off her scream. She coughed and struggled, but clawed hands caught her rubber-gloved arms in an iron grip. She yelped as they twisted her arms behind her back and roped them together. They dragged her off through unknown tunnels, kicking her stomach with every attempted scream for help.

They stopped and shoved Ran to her knees, gasping for breath, onto hard, dry stone. They yanked the bag off her head. Ran screamed. Hard, spiky-furred knuckles cracked across the side of her face. She bit through the side of her tongue, spitting blood. Her head spun as she tried to raise it.

Broken furniture and dried hay burned in a small, iron bin fire at the center of the open, rough-hewn cavern. Short alcoves filled with dirty, oversized rats’s nests pocked the walls. Black, polluted condensation dripped from the ceiling and echoed over Ran’s ragged breath.

A five-foot-six wererat all thick, corded muscle under spiky brown fur and studded leather stood in front of her. Their long, naked tail snaked over the stone behind them with a rough, dry scraping. Their pointed nose twitched and wrinkled.

“You swim up the wrong channel, merfolk?”

“I’m Handmaiden Ran,” she lisped, “here to perform community service.”

The tail lashed across the floor and whipped up under her chin, raising her gaze to the wererat’s. Her eyes met theirs, narrow and black. They dilated, but not in fear. With Cinnabar’s disappearance, she hadn’t been touched in over seven days.

The wererat stepped back but not before a low growl rose to the base of their throat. They yanked their tail away. Unbalanced, Ran toppled onto her face with a yelp.

“Nice meeting ya, Ran. I’m Girrigz, she/her, leader of the colony. Guess we do got a bit of service you could help us with.”

The same hands that had shoved her to the ground now hauled her to her feet.

“Take the little merfolk to the clog.”

They snickered, hissed, and dragged her away.

Two thick grates of rusted iron hedged in the section of sewer tunnel. A steady, stinking flow of sewage pumped in from a humanoid-sized crack in the wall opposite them. It fed into the hulking pile of filth and debris overflowing the channel and its walkway between the grates below. A mechanism of large gears and handles protruded from the wall beside the eastern grate on the opposite side of the channel.

The wererats cut her ropes.

“Just swim over and turn the crank. Easy for you, merfolk.”

Ran waded down the stairs, the reeking waters finally reaching her mid-thigh. She walked forward cautiously, each step straining against a churning undercurrent. A wave rippled out from the hulking pile of debris. She stopped.

Two thick, rubbery tentacles shot out from the water. Ran screamed. They wrapped around her arms and legs and thrust her upside-down into the air over the quaking pile. Sludge, offal, and shit exploded off the pile over a human-sized maw lined with rows upon rows of razor-sharp teeth.

A tentacle of eyeballs rose up from the sewage. Ran locked eyes with the otyugh’s, a word of magic on her aching tongue, but the otyugh spoke first.

“Friend?”

Ran dissolved into near-hysterical laughter. She stopped only several minutes after the otyugh turned her right-side-up.

“What are you doing here?”

“I look for Rolth.”

For the first time since she’d entered the noxious fuming sewers, she caught her breath.

“How long has Rolth been gone?”

“A long time.”

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the underground-dwelling otyugh didn’t have a grasp on the air-breathers’s system of solar days, but it was still a little disappointing that Ran couldn’t confirm her new theory: Cinnabar had been assigned to Rolth’s assassination, perhaps. She glanced over at the wererats. They watched, frozen and gaping, as though they’d forgotten that their leader had tasked her with a community service.

“Friend, would you mind turning that crank?”

The otyugh set her on its brow ridge and wrapped both spiky tentacles through the gears of the mechanism. It ripped the crank and every single other part off the wall in a clattering hail of stone. The two grates screeched metal against metal as they crashed into the ceiling. Metal and stone splashed into the sewage, but the unblocked channel swept them all away.


	10. Take Me to Your Fucking Leader

Chapter 10: Take Me to Your Fucking Leader

Varani gave the wererats a mock salute but inwardly cursed their own inability to use fire or lightning down here unless they wanted the whole tunnel to go up in flames. The wererats snarled and fired their crossbows. Varani jumped back from the edge of the pool and snapped a finger-gun at the nearest wererat on the ceiling.

“Boom.”

A five-foot-tall sphere of whirling air shot off the end of their fingers. It slammed into the wererat and knocked them loose. They squeaked and fell straight into the stinking, sucking sludge.

One bolt scratched Varani’s pointed ear as it whizzed by. They blocked a second off the blade of their sickle. The third tore a circle out of their defending arm. Varani huffed through their clenched teeth and flicked the tip of their finger gun.

The gusting sphere hurtled into the next ceiling wererat, the one too cocky to have dropped the crossbow and crawled to safety. The wererat flailed for a second grip, but the the wind followed. They splashed down and continued to flail as they sunk into the shit.

The last two wised up and jumped off the wall, dropping their crossbows into the floor fungi. Varani shifted back, sickle at the ready, and beckoned with two fingers. The wererats charged, drawing tetanus-brown shivs.

The gusting sphere hurtled into the right wererat’s back. The wererat slid past their mate and slipped straight into the steel arc of Varani’s sickle.

The left wererat stabbed their shiv at Varani’s back, but it was a short reach blade. Varani’s foot whipped into their wrist. The fungi muffled the shiv’s fall.

The right came up snarling and stabbing. Varani knocked their arm away and swept their sickle through the wererat’s throat. The body dropped at the edge of the sludge pool. Varani kicked it in before it hit the floor.

The last wererat looked from Varani to the shiv and back to Varani.

“I wouldn’t friend.”

The wererat sighed and straightened up. They both watched the dead rat sink back-first into the sludge.

“What d’ya want, pooper scooper?”

“Take me to your fucking leader.”

\--/--

Brienne shared a small but efficiently packed room with Zellara’s little brother, who snored on the bottom of two sleeping shelves nailed to the wall. He didn’t wake as Maldrag, Zellara, and Dhatri tiptoed around the room sifting through meticulously folded piles of clothes, peeking through fruit crate drawers, and vetting toys.

Maldrag took the corner furthest from the door. A sackcloth doll laid squished between the back of a set of drawers and the wall. She reached down and tweezed its arm between two fingers. Its stuffed, bulbous head bumped against the wall with an improbable weight.

Maldrag laid out the doll in her hand and loosed the drawstring around its head. Stuffed in the stuffing were ten coins of pure silver.

“Z?”

Zellara stood stock still, the skin of her face pulled taut over her skull with...fear. Dhatri approached, but Zellara clamped a hand on the sleeve of his night robe, stopping him in his tracks.

“You can’t tell Mom.”

“What?” asked Maldrag. “What if this is how your sister got sick?”

Zellara only shook her head. Dhatri nodded slowly. This was a family matter. Maldrag was not family. She tossed the doll with their head of coins between the two of them.

Of course the coins spilled out. The two scrambled to keep them from clinking against the floor, even diving to the floor.

“Sorry about that.”

Dhatri’s face came up grim and sober.

“Let’s keep looking.”

Maldrag and Zellara sobered up with him. It was possible that the coins had nothing to do with Brienne’s illness, but if they were, there was no telling how many of these were in circulation and where they ended up. All of Korvosa could be staring plague down its maggot-ridden eye sockets.

They scoured the small room three times in the next hour, but they found nothing else out of the ordinary. Dhatri woke Zellara’s little brother up to get him out and put the whole room under quarantine. He wrapped the doll and its head full of coins in a rag and passed it back to Maldrag.

“I’m going to stay here and keep an eye out on your family,” he said to Zellara. “Could you and Maldrag bring this to my church?”

“We’re on it,” said Maldrag, pointedly ignoring the guilt and conflict on her lover’s face.

They went back upstairs to the loft to put clothes on under the armor. Zellara stepped out of her leather and went immediately for the fine gold chains she’d stuffed under her mattress. She wasn’t hiding them for safety. She hid them from her family, her mother.

A deep blush gave Zellara’s dark skin a reddish undertone. She moved around the room gathering her clothes and armor and kept her face to the floor. Maldrag couldn’t tell if it would be a relief or not for Zellara to spit it out, so she asked.

“Z, you wanna talk?”

“We have to go to the church.”

“Right, that’s not a lot of time.”

Zellara nodded, cheeks puffed full of breath. Which she spat out at a hundred words a minute.

“There was a time when we were almost not-poor and that was back when Dad was around.”

He’d gotten in on a good deal, but he had to work all the time, so he’d left all the money management with Tayce. She was a good woman, but far too trusting.

People could smell the new money on Tayce and her husband. When her husband left for a month-long business trip, they went to Tayce with all kinds of their own ‘business proposals.’ She invested in every one of them, and lost their entire savings.

“So now Mom’s living on an allowance, and I’m the one keeping us over water, and I really need this job, and I think we need to go.”

Maldrag squeezed Zellara’s shoulder.

“Thanks. I’m ready.”

Zellara nodded, blinking hard but smiling. They hurried out of the house and into the quiet, gaslit street.

\--/--

The wererats escorted Ran and the otyugh escorted the wererats back down the tunnel. The fire in the iron bin shook with a wild dance as the otyugh entered the cavern. Girrigz stepped back into a low-growling ready stance, but Ran quickly stepped in beside them.

“Girrigz, this is Friend. Friend, Girrigz, she/her.”

“I asked you to get rid of the clog, so why the fuck am I looking at it?”

Ran walked back toward Friend, raising her arms into an embrace. One tentacle wrapped around her waist and under her knee, sweeping her off her feet. She barely registered the escorting wererats running to the far wall under the delicious pressure. The otyugh pulled her in toward its waxy, hulking mass split nearly in half by the toothy stretch of their maw. Ran brushed a kiss on the edge of the lower, lipless rim of their mouth.

“Don’t be afraid. Friend and I are lovers.”

“You fucked a monster?”

“Are you curious?”

Girrigz stared at them, slack-jawed. Her long, naked tail stopped moving entirely and hung as limp as a wet rag.

“Boss?”

Her ears twitched toward the wererats cowering on the wall. She let out a long sigh.

“Leave us.”

“Boss, are you--”

Girrigz’s shoulders shook. She threw her back in a hissing laugh, tail straight as an arrow. The wererats scurried out of the cavern. Only then did her laughter die down. She looked at Ran and the otyugh, shaking her head.

“How?”

“Did you want to watch?” asked Ran. “Or participate?”

“I...dunno.”

Ran pointed down and Friend set her back on her feet. The tentacle loosed from her body and left her head reeling in the cold, empty air. She steeled herself to the chill and peeled off the rubber suit. She wore nothing but a thin coat of sweat underneath. Girrigz’s eyes followed her finger trail between her breasts and down between her legs, nose and tail twitching.

“If you’re not sure, then you should start with me.”

Girrigz crossed the space between them and crushed Ran against her furred and leathered muscle. Ran drank in her heady musk, fingers fumbling against the straps of her armor. Her fur bled heat into her sweating skin.

Girrigz’s fingers found her lips while Ran still struggled with the wererat’s armored leggings. Her squirms only rubbed more of Girrigz’s animal scent off her fur and all over her, straight to her head. She let out a giddy breath and pulled the last strap loose, but Girrigz’s tail whipped around her ass and snaked across her clit. The tail pulled tight, rough, dry hide grinding down to her pubic bone as Girrigz pushed into her dripping cunt. Ran choked and wheezed into the wererat’s shoulder, forced to cum despite herself.

Ran nuzzled through spiky fur to the heat of Girrigz’s skin and the weight of her muscle. Her fingers found the wererat’s cunt on the slight rise of a genital mound. She rubbed circles into the reddening lips as she sunk to her knees. Girrigz’s taloned fingers knotted in Ran’s hair and sealed her mouth over Girrigz’s lips. Her rough tail wrapped around Ran’s bare neck.

“Drink me, water breather.”

Ran moaned her assent from her chest into Girrigz’s cunt. She licked, sucked, and tongue-fucked the wererat until Girrigz’s legs shook on either side of her face. Ran flicked her twitching clit. Girrigz cried out and spilt her water into Ran’s face and waiting mouth.

Girrigz’s tail loosened. She sank down between Ran’s knees and licked her water off the merfolk’s face. Ran turned her head to take the wererat’s rough, burning tongue into her mouth. Her legs locked around Girrigz. Ran rocked into her playfully but with enough force to send them toppling to the ground. Girrigz grunted and pulled Ran’s head back by a fistful of hair.

“Don’t make me tie you.”

“It’s funny you think that could stop me.”

Girrigz growled and rolled. Ran gasped. Her back hit the floor, wrists pinned over her head. The claws of one hand latched into the stone. The claws of the other bit into nipple and tit.

“Open your legs.”

The very hungry merfolk obeyed. Ran grunted as Girrigz shifted between her thighs, her weight centered over both their cunts. The wererat pressed the claws of one foot at the base of Ran’s neck. She wrapped her arm around Ran’s thigh for balance and rocked and ground with knife-edge pressure.

Ran screamed. Girrigz’s foot held her head and neck against the floor as her back arched and her hips bucked uncontrollably. 

The end of wererat’s tail pushed into Girrigz’s own lips. Ran felt the brush of the rough hide but couldn’t see from where the wererat pinned her as the long stretch of the tail bent double. Her breath hitched. The doubled end pressed against her wet mouth. Ran bucked even wilder under Girrigz’s grind trying to let it in, but the wererat only laughed and panted.

“Beg me for my tail.”

“Girrigz, please.”

“Let me hear it.”

“I want to your tail to fucking rail me.”

Girrigz’s doubled tail pierced her mouth and twisted inside her with a will of its own. Ran wheezed and rocked so violently that the wererat’s muscles visibly strained under her fur to keep her down and pliant. But Girrigz couldn’t steel herself any longer from Ran’s grind.

The wererat’s eyes rolled back, wet nostrils flaring. She huffed and panted and pressed herself against Ran’s leg, desperate for the slightest support as she lost all control to her wracking cunt.

The wererat’s tail went rigid within her. Girrigz’s foot loosed, slid, and squeezed down on Ran’s throat. Her back bowed between Girrigz’s foot and cunt. With Girrigz vibrating in cum on Ran’s clit, her walls spasmed into a tail-wringing clench and sent her convulsing over the edge.

Girrigz dropped onto Ran’s limp but buzzing body. Her tail squeezed and squelched out from Ran’s mouth. Her fur wicked her sweat right off onto Ran and the floor, dripping out a sweat outline of the merfolk. The only sounds left in the cavern were their matched ragged breaths and a soft, wet thwicking.

Girrigz pushed up onto her hands. Ran pushed up onto her elbows under the wererat. They turned toward the otyugh. Friend’s fourth tentacle had emerged from between their legs. They worked its bumpy length with their massive tongue, stopping only as they registered Girrigz and Ran’s gaze.

“Ho. Ly. Fuck,” said Girrigz, voice hushed and trembling.

“Wait til it’s inside you.”

“I’d heard you merfolk were insatiable...”

“And?”

Girrigz grinned and pushed up to her feet.

“We wererats are worse.”

She offered Ran a hand. The two approached the otyugh with shaky steps but hand in hand.


	11. Something in the Water

Chapter 11: Something in the Water

A low rumble like distant thunder broke the streetside quiet five blocks out from the church of Pharasma. It grew to clamor at the fourth block at edge of a sea of poor folk. As Maldrag and Zellara drew near, the sea parted into those who could stand and those who’d been dragged out in wagons or on pallets. Bright red splotches covered their coughing, comatose forms.

Maldrag grabbed Zellara’s hand and weaved shoulder-first through the throng of the poor and the sick, or realistically, the dying. A single priest like Dhatri could heal three or four people in a day. An entire district’s worth of people clogged these streets. Maldrag found herself holding her breath for as long as she could.

Every guard in the district had gathered to form a humanoid barricade around the front stairs of the church. They kept back the crowd at the pointed ends of their pikes. All had wrapped rags around their noses and mouths. When Maldrag and Zellara showed their crimson blade pendants, they parted as grudgingly and narrowly as possible.

The sounds of the crowd crashed like the waves of the ocean against the brick walls of the church. The hard wooden pews and even the altar had been pushed to the sides to make room for rows of cots and pallets, all occupied. Two priests and six acolytes with white and blue scarves tied around the lower half of their faces scurried down the narrow aisles, dabbing away sweat and administering water. They had already exhausted their healing spells.

An acolyte spotted Maldrag and Zellara first. They brought over a haggard priest. The priest’s black-ringed eyes zeroed in on their pendants. They broke into a teary smile and collapsed slantwise on Maldrag and Zellara’s shoulders.

“Handmaidens, thank Pharasma! There are too many sick. We need the Queen’s aid.”

“We’ll let her know at once,” said Maldrag.

“She didn’t send you?”

“No, that was Dhatri,” said Zellara, holding up the coin-stuffed doll.

The bewildered priest accepted the doll in one hand and the coins in the other. Their eyes widened improbably larger as the understanding dawned.

“Please, sit where you like. I’ll perform the divining at once.”

Maldrag and Zellara headed for the lowest stack of pews against the wall. Maldrag gave Zellara a boost up though only leaned against them herself. Both Maidens drew up their collars as high as they would go. They barely reached below their chins.

The priest returned ten minutes later. They had aged ten years. All the blood drained from Maldrag’s face.

“No.”

“Where did you get these?”

“We don’t know! We don’t know! My sister--” Zellara broke off breathing hard, chest heaving.

“Fuck.”

\--/--

The last of the wererats led Varani down a wet, stinking, fuming swathe of rough hewn tunnels that widened into a network of caverns lit by the yellow-green glow of fungi. They stopped in front of an iron door guarded by three wererats, their rat-like eyes and snouts scrunched into weirdly sheepish expressions.

“Why’s everyone out here?” asked Varani’s escort.

“Boss is busy.”

“They can’t be that busy,” said Varani. “I’ve got a job to do, and I can’t have any more of you colonists blocking my passages, so step aside, please.”

“Chuckeez, would you take your half-elf and--”

Varani drew their sickle under the wererat’s jaw.

“Step aside, furball.”

The two on either side of the threatened guard pressed the pointed tips of their crossbows to Varani’s rubber suit. Varani immediately regretted losing their temper. Only Zellara knew a mending spell, and every tear meant more shit slopping straight in. Varani stepped back.

At the same time, Chuckeez placed a clawed hand on either crossbow.

“We’re seeing the boss.”

Varani whooped. They grabbed the wererat in front of them by the lapels of their studded leather and pulled them aside. Varani kicked the door open with a gong-like clang. Varani staggered back as burning stink of wet garbage, sweat, and shit punched in their nose. 

They saw the boss. The boss was definitely too busy to see them. A gods-damned-fucking otyugh had the writhing wererat wrapped in a tentacle like an anaconda’s prey. The otyugh screwed them up and down a bumpy, foot-and-a-half long cock so large and wide that it distended the wererat’s stomach when the otyugh impaled them down to the hilt. The wererat’s raw, throat-wrecked screams of gut-wrenching pleasure gurgled out around a second tentacle shoved down their throat.

The third tentacle pinned none other than Ran the merfolk to the stone wall of the cavern, coils crushing her as she convulsed uncontrollably. She mewled like a murdered cat with her head back and tongue lolling from the side of her mouth. The otyugh’s massive pink tongue curled in a thick, tendril-y funnel that pumped in and out of her ass, sloughing off a bucket of saliva down her kicking, twitching legs with each heavy, wet pump.

Her glazed, half-lidded eyes met Varani’s. They cleared, partially.

“Va-Vara-nghhh!”

The funneled tongue squelched monstrously with a deep, gut-crushing plunge. Ran’s back would’ve arched to breaking without the knot of squeezing coils resisting her struggle. Instead, her rigid, bowed body vibrated like a snake’s rattle. Her curled toes smeared jagged trails of slick against the wall.

Varani backed away from the opened door with a pounding in their chest that thrumbed all the way down between their legs. Their throat choked their voice high and thin.

“Actually, I’ll wait.”

The wererats said no more. Chuckeez grabbed Varani’s wrist and dragged Varani, stumbling after them, down to a much quieter cavern. Another fire burned from an iron bin at the center of the room. Four wererats in dire rat form shivered in hollowed out nests in the stone wall, softened by filthy straw and rags. Their fur had fallen out in clumps over angry red splotches on their skin.

Varani and Chuckeez collapsed on a hard stone bench along the opposite wall. They didn’t say anything, instead staring into the eye-cauterizing, mind-purifying dance of the flames. Only the occasional fit of violent coughing and hacking from the dire rats breached the silence. Varani waited at least fifteen minutes before trying their voice again.

“What, ah, what happened to your friends?”

“We, ah, we really dunno.”

The sewer dwelling wererats were exceptionally hardy creatures. These four were fine yesterday when they’d been assigned together on scavenging team. They’d even scoured one of the cleaner tunnels, one that emptied out into the sea. There’d been nothing unusual about their haul--barrels, lumber, and coin--apart from suggesting a recent shipwreck off the Korvosan coast.

“We burned it all after they got sick, cept the coin.”

“Was it foreign currency?”

“Nah, all Korvosan.”

For a ship to have wrecked so close to the city without anyone’s notice wasn’t just strange but seemingly impossible. It was more likely...that all the witnesses had been silenced. The fast-acting disease could be the silencing agent itself. Varani made a mental note to check Ran and themself into the castle clinic when they got back.

“I’m gonna add this to my report. We’ll send someone down here to check out your friends.”

“You don’t--we’re not--”

Varani held up a palm.

“Queen’s subjects or not, we’ve got to share shit tunnels. Whatever fucks them up fucks us up, too. Trust me, we’d rather heal a couple wererats than spread this disease through the entire freaking city.”

It was the perfect nightmare scenario to bleach the scene they’d just witnessed right out of Varani’s brain.

\--/--

News of the plague reached Castle Korvosa before Maldrag and Zellara did. A second barricade of pike-armed soldiers met them at the base of the castle walkway. They wore genuine masks over the lower halves of their faces. 

The soldiers sent for more to escort the Handmaidens up to the Citadel. The guards let them in, but they weren’t allowed up to Field Marshal Kroft’s office. They took Maldrag and Zellara to a waiting room typically reserved for visitors except that all the soft, comfortable furniture had been been replaced by hard, sterile metal.

Maldrag and Zellara sat on metal folding chairs on the same side of the metal table. They had their pick of the window, the door, or the dull, rectangular mirror at the head of the table to stare at. They had hours. They were even able to watch the sunrise together through the little window, naked without its curtains, though neither of them could enjoy it.

Varani burst in with Ran leaning hard on their arm, pocket watch in hand, both stinking of shit in their muddied rubber suits. Maldrag and Zellara scooted their chairs away from the table. Zellara scooted hers all the way to the wall, forearm over her nose and mouth.

Ran collapsed in a chair. Varani snapped their fingers at the mirror.

“On. Turn on.”

“I’ve got thirty minutes before my tail comes back.”

Maldrag hopped out her seat and tapped on the mirror. The last time Ran’s time wound down, Kroft had forced Maldrag, Varani, and Sabina to carry Ran down to the coast together with the added challenge of remaining undetected as a ‘training exercise.’ Never again. Maldrag slapped the mirror.

A white star burst and crackled into view at the center of the mirror. It spread out with moving color to the edges. Kroft sat at her desk in a mask identical to the guards’s.

“Hey Maidens, welcome to quarantine.”

“Wait, does that mean we don’t have to don’t have to fake being marine life activists again?” asked Varani.

“Yeah, no someone will bring in a tub for Ran.”

“Please tell me they’re taking their suits, too,” said Zellara.

“I’m gonna need all of your clothes and your gear. Hey--don’t start stripping until this call is finished.”

Varani ignored the half-hearted order and continued peeling off their suit. Kroft rolled their eyes. Maldrag told her about Zellara’s sister and what they’d seen at the church of Pharasma. Varani only stopped when she mentioned the coins. They nearly fell down with their suit around their around their ankles.

“Kroft, did you hear anything about a shipwreck off the coast?”

Kroft’s eyes narrowed.

“No, but I should have.”

Varani related what they’d learned from the wererats and put in a request for a healer.

“I’m not gonna lie to you. We’re low on healers. The Queen is putting together a task force to make it easier for them to deal with all this, but try not to get sick. And not to promise something you can’t deliver.”

“Then what the fuck are we supposed to tell the Queen’s subjects?”

“Wait until we’ve got the system in place, and then there’ll be a standardized recommended course of action.”

“Bullshit’em, got it,” Varani muttered.

Kroft threw up her hands. There was nothing she could do.

“Ran, I need you to go out into the water and check for that wreck tomorrow.”

“Of course, Marshal.”

“Maldrag, Zellara, and Varani, there’s someone here with a case.”

Maldrag and Zellara both looked at the naked Varani. Rather than put the suit back on, Varani simply crawled under the table. They raised their arm above the tabletop to give the mirror an a-okay. Kroft sighed but gave up their seat to a handsome if haggard young noble.

“Greetings Maidens, my name is Amin Jalento, he/him, though some of you already know that,” he said with ample side-eye directed at Zellara.

Zellara mouth hardened to a grim line. Maldrag hated him in an instant.

“I have business with Lord Ausio and Lady Olauren Carowyn of the Carowyn candle fortune, but I haven’t heard from them in over a week.” 

He’d last seen them leaving the execution party for an after party at their manor. He’d gone to the Carowyn Manor last night, but the place had been locked down tight without a sound or light. 

“They’ve been known to host eccentric parties, but this is more than a little a extreme.”

“So what do you want us to do about it?” Maldrag asked.

“Get inside and find out what’s the hold-up, of course.”

“Marshal! Is the Marshal there? Kroft!”

Kroft popped back into the mirror, giving Jalento an apologetic nod.

“Yes, Maldrag?”

“This is really what we’re supposed to be doing? In this time of crisis?”

“The Queen’s subjects come first.”

And the nobles before them. Maldrag dropped her chin in her hands but gave the noble brat a jerk of a nod.


	12. Party 90210

Chapter 12: Party 90210

Zellara followed Varani who followed Maldrag up Shoreline Way, a winding road paved by seashells with a private beach to one side and a garden of palms and other seaside vegetation to the other. The garden belonged to a public park, but judging from its gated sides and the guards posted at the entrances, undesirables would be forced to leave.

“You know what would be hilarious?” said Varani.

“What?”

“If they came to arrest us while we were trying to get into the manor.”

“That would the opposite of hilarious.”

At the top of the rose and the rise stood Carowyn Manor, the in-town home of the Carowyns overlooking their private stretch of beach below. Dark green vines climbed the coquina walls while cinderberry garlands with red wax candles in their branches festooned the doors. They had closed the red curtains in every window.

Maldrag dropped to one knee at the black sheet gate, heavily chained and padlocked. She stuck a handful of lockpicks between her teeth. She tried the first with her ear against the padlock. She placed it back in her mouth and switched in another. The padlock clunked open. The chains slid down to the ground.

Maldrag pushed the doors open to reveal the full, extraneous expanse of the manor, a smaller copy of the manor as a servants’s residence, and a garden swirling around a pond the size of a small lake under a gazebo on stilts. A line of red wax candles had been drip-sealed to the gazebo’s corners. Zellara shook her head. The red gravel of the walkway crunched under their feet all the way to the front doors. Maldrag had to unlock those too.

Zellara gagged at the stale, stinking cloud of blood congealed over shit, piss, and other bodily discharges. Over a dozen masked nobles in sequined velvet, plunging silks, and tickling feathers laid in thick, soiled heaps on the marble floor. At the center of the filth-smeared entrance hall, three couples jerked and swayed in one of those stiff dances inexplicably favored by the upper crust. Maybe it was a side-effect of being weighed down by multiple layers of gold and fabric. Zellara rubbed her arms, fine chains pressing into her skin.

Varani lifted a gloved and soiled arm off the floor on the toe of their boot.

“Usually I’d say ‘dead,’ but it’s kinda hard to tell.”

Maldrag waved at the dancers.

“Hey, Queen’s Handmaidens here to crash your party by royal decree. Real question: are we looking at a crime scene?”

The dancers made a final, jerky twirl before bowing to their partners and stepping apart. Their heads slumped to either side as though blasted by a phantom crossfire. Zellara couldn’t see their eyes through the slits of their masks, but she their critical stares burned through skin.

The mouths of those with half-masks opened wide, exhaling a cloud of decay-sweet stink. All six dancers screamed. They launched themselves at the Maidens. Varani cursed at a mile a minute.

“Goddamn black market necromancers-for-hire.”

Varani flung out their hand. Three burning arcs leapt at the nearest three dancers. They caught alight with a screech, one collapsing in a heap of melted sequins and joins. The others kept coming.

Maldrag charged and roared. Her ax glinted at the height of its. vicious arc. It cleaved through the neck and chest of the two burning dancers.

Zellara slammed her palm to the floor as they hit the ground.

“Back off!”

Four small, bloated shadow demons rose up from a line black, broken pentagrams in front of her. The nearest dancer collided with a dretch. The two fell scrabbling in Zellara’s face. A second dretch leaped onto the dancer’s back, tearing in with tooth and claw.

The second pair of dretches threw themselves at the last two dancers. Maldrag’s ax swooped in over the three-foot demons and cleanly lopped off both masked heads.

The dretches dropped the unmoving dancers and scurried over to help their fellows pull on the first dancer they’d torn into.

“Hey, thanks, that’s enough,” said Zellara before her demons dismembered anybody.

They vanished into the darkness. The last dancer thunked to the ground. Varani pumped two fists in the air.

“Go team!”

“Just be careful,” said Maldrag, lifting a mask off a make-upped and filth-painted face. “We don’t want to be the ones responsible for ending any dynasties just because some rich people got bored and decided to play zombies.”

“Ok. So we only attack the ones that attack us first,” said Zellara.

“I’m gonna call us Team It-Isn’t-Murder-If-They’re-Already-Dead.”

Maldrag pushed up to her feet, laughing with her ax still in hand.

“That’s way too long. I need to save that spit for more important things.”

Maldrag and Varani waggled their eyebrows at each other. Zellara, face heating for reasons she didn’t have time to understand right now, marched down the entrance hall. Those two followed on her heels, whispering and giggling increasingly worse team names to each other.

“CSI: Our Work Is Actively Trying to Kill Us.”

“Too long. I’ve got it--CSI: Underpaid.”

“Eyyy--”

Zellara stopped and shushed them. The faint pluck of a harp spilled out from under the door at the end of the hall. Varani stepped in front of her. Maldrag stepped in front of Varani. She went through the door shoulder-first.

Two questionably living nobles in a lion and lioness mask sat in overstuffed armchairs before an empty fireplace. One in a peacock mask offered them a choice of cigars from a silver tray.

Eight sat at a finely set dinner table swarming with ants and flies. Four dug their spoons into the discolored semisolid anyway. The other four leaned on table in the path of the insects and listened to one dressed as a blue-winged angel plucking a large, standing harp. A sea serpent, a castle tower, a swan, and a blue skeleton danced jerkily to the twangs.

“Why is this so fucking hard?” Maldrag muttered under her breath.

The music stopped.

“Anyone who’s still alive, speak now or...die, I guess,” said Zellara.

Every member of the masquerade opened their mouths wide and screamed.

\--/--

Ran lashed her long, teal-scaled tail and caught the current from the Jeggare River out to sea. She slipped through the water with her pocket watch in hand. At the seven minute mark, she dove out from the current by the Korvosan coast. She stayed close to the rocks. As she descended, the water pressed ever tighter against her bare skin.

In the distance, a shadow among the rocks grew and split in two over a jagged outcropping. The bow had split from the larger section of the stern, both on their sides in a nest of splinters and timbers.

Ran swam by the broken bow of the ship first. The name Direption had been painted along the side of the hull. Two debris-choked decks laid open to the sea. The water wriggled in the shadows, every shadow. Their waves brushed over Ran’s skin and left it cold, raising the fine hairs on her arms and the back of her neck. She didn’t swim any closer to the bow.

Ran drew near to the stern piece instead. Murky water flowed through a splinter-toothed hole in the hold. She peered from the outside in. Loose timbers, small, dead fish, and dozens of identical boxes floated in the quiet dark.

A shiver travelled down her spine to the tip of her tail. She pulled back from the jagged hole. Down among the rocks, sleek blue fins cut knife-like through the water, a shark. If the shark had made this its lair, she had minutes to investigate the boxes, maybe less. Ran cursed and dived through the hole.

She grabbed the nearest box. The metal was lighter than she’d expected. The unlatched lid opened easily. The box was empty except for the foot of a rat. She closed the lid and stuck the box her kelp-woven messenger bag. Maybe Kroft would find some meaning in it.

The door at the back of the hull had swollen shut, but a large rock had pierced through the wall and collapsed the side of the hall. Ran weaved between the murk and timbers into waters thick with the smell of trapped blood. Glass-paned cabinets had shattered across the floor and over bent metal bed frames. The water swirled with a haze of half-eaten fish, eels, and other chum. 

Ran pulled a fish head out of her billowing locks with a sigh. She threw it into a broken cabinet, but it stuck on a glass shard.

“Do you always play with your food?”

A green-haired, silvery-skinned merfolk floated arms-crossed in the hole to the hall. The razor-sharp fingers of a green trident pierced the water over their shoulder.

“Only with the food that wants to play.”

The merfolk chuckled and entered the shark’s killing room with a fluid wave of their bronze-scaled tail. They swam a slow circle, forcing Ran to do the same to keep a wary distance.

“I’m Wicker, he/him.”

“I’m Ran and I don’t have time to play with you.”

“If you’re scared of the shark, don’t be. Bluetooth and I go way back.”

He wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t reassuring, either.

“What’s your siren count?”

“I’m three from a Scylla.”

“I’m one short,” he smiled.

Of course he was. The corner of Ran’s mouth twitched in envy. His smile only widened. Ran stopped circling. Wicker swam to a stop so close to her face that his sharply hooked nose slipped past hers, nearly brushing skin.

“I challenge you, Wicker.”

He offered up his hand.

“Challenge accepted, Ran. Come with me,” he murmured beside her ear, his voice thickening with rising blood.

Her own cold blood flushed up her chest. The hardened beads of her tits poked his skin. She wished they’d cut him but that was getting ahead of herself. Ran placed her trembling hand in his. His eyes, dark as deep water, dilated at the shaking touch, gills flaring.

“Do you have a sleeve?”

“Of course. Safety first.”

Wicker pulled her from the chummy room out to the side of the ship. The blue shark, large enough to fit their entire bodies from head to tail in their gut, watched them from the rocky outcropping. Ran shifted unconsciously closer to Wicker as he led them to the bow piece. A stiff ridge of her tail brushed up his. A sharp thrill shot straight to mouth on the back of her tail. She swallowed her gasp, eyes wide. She couldn’t let the other merfolk know how long she’d been starved for the touch of another. She saving that for Cinnabar.

Wicker didn’t appear to notice, deep in focus of their death rut. He swam straight into the wriggling water of the bow. A swarm of eels circled the room, occasionally flickering with electricity. They parted for Wicker, who drew Ran toward a sunken bed. The white sheets and curtains of the canopy twisted above like sheets. The eels closed back around them in a wriggling sphere.

“Do you need an anchor?” he asked, pulling a curtain down from its twisting dance.

Ran patted the sturdy bedpost to the canopy behind her.

“No, there are plenty of holds here.”

He tied the curtain around his waist above the start of his tail. His twin claspers had extended down below his waist where a penis would have hung on an air-breather. As promised, he drew a thin, translucent sleeve for them from his own bag before tossing his gear aside. The smooth, bronze claspers were longer and wider than a pair daggers.

Ran reached out to him but yanked her hand back to the strap of her bag. She turned away from him to shrug it off onto the floor.

“Take it off.”

“Oh, sorry, are you having second thoughts?”

“No…,” she said, turning over her shoulder.

Ran drifted to his side of the bed. Her tail coiled on the swollen mattress, and she sunk to perch with her head at the level of his tail.

“I want to suck you.”

He leaned his hands on her shoulders and lowered his forehead to hers.

“Why don’t you ask for my permission?”

She growled at him, bumping her forehead against his. Wicker’s fingers pressed into her skin. Then he let go. He drifted back from her.

Ran couldn’t stiffle her gasp. She reached out to him. He grabbed her wrists, growling back. But when she lowered her head, he closed the gap between them so his bared claspers brushed the side of her face. She nuzzled between the cold, blunt twins and dragged her tongue up their line. 

Wicker hummed and set her hands on either side of his tail. He wrapped his fingers in her hair. She looked up at him and spoke between licks.

“May I...take you...down my throat?”

Wicker hissed and pulled her mouth to the blunted tips.


	13. Light a Candle for the Bored

Chapter 13: Light a Candle for the Bored

“Ok, yeah, it’s fire time,” said Varani.

They flung their hand up at the dining table. A twenty-foot high ring of blazing purple fire burst up around the screaming diners and their musical accompaniment. It still fell short of the crystal chandeliers overhead.

The lions, peacock, and assorted dancers charged at the Maidens.

“Z, cover!”

“Go, go, abomination!”

Zellara slammed her palm to the floor. A broken black pentagon manifested under the leaping undead. It sucked in their own shadows and sent them surging up into a six-foot, gangling demon with a back-bent horn of shadow.

All four dancers tripped over the sudden obstacle, two crashing into the lions. Liquid black slime sizzled into the limbs that banged the babau’s bone-tight hide. The dancers screamed at clawed at themselves. 

The babau looked back at Zellara, their head tilting in a neck-breaking curve over their shoulder. Their mouth split into a needle-sharp grin.

Maldrag’s greataxe cleaved through the peacock. The undead fell in two pieces on either side of its steel head. Without a moment to waste, she struck her drum with the end of its handle.

Magic pulsed the beat into Zellara’s bones. Her aura flared shadow black, as did her demon’s. The babau let out a soundless roar in time with the magic pulse. They tore into the dancers with acid-dripping teeth and claws.

The lion and lionness pounced at the crouched Maldrag.

“Nah.”

Wind blasted out from Varani’s palm. It slammed into the lions, knocking them down and across the floor at Zellara. She squealed and sprang back out of the way.

Steel flashed. Maldrag’s greataxe ripped a single, continuous red arc through both lions. Their twitching corpse-forms fell still. Maldrag caught Zellara’s eye. She winked and caught Zellara’s breath, too.

Varani’s firewall sputtered out. The eight diners and harpist charged through the dying flames.

Zellara’s babau hurtled in from the side, hurling themself into the pack with a soundless scream. The nine toppled over each other in a tangled mass of flailing limbs.

Maldrag and Varani both looked at Zellara.

“God dang, Zellara,” said Varani, “what are you feeding that guy?”

“Oh, I don’t the know, the souls of coworkers who forget that I’m a delicate marshmallow of a halfling, maybe?!”

Maldrag put a hand on Zellara’s shoulder and hefted her greataxe onto her own.

“Guys, come on, are you gonna let the demon have all the fun?”

“Yeah, actually. I’m pretty sure they got it covered.”

“Delicate. Marshmallow.”

Maldrag sighed, shrugged, and then roared. She charged off to the slaughter.

Zellara and Varani remained on the sidelines, not speaking, and ever-so-slightly turning further away from each other without losing sight of their leader.

Maldrag jogged back with a second skin of sweat and a bounce in her step. Zellara and Varani plodded on either side up to the second floor.

The main hall doubled as an art gallery. Gilt-framed paintings of Korvosan cityscapes and dour noble portraits covered the walls and looked down on the hall below. Several filthy, make-upped and costumed nobles stood in front of the largest and longest of the paintings.

“Good morning--afternoon? Queen’s Handmaidens here. Have any of you seen or are the Carowyns?”

Unlike the rent-a-corpses downstairs, these nobles gave no sign of having heard Zellara. Although they could very easily have been ignoring her.

Maldrag waved a hand between one’s mask and the gravelly Korvosan beach in front of them. The noble didn’t move a muscle.

“I now pronounce you art and dead!” 

Varani’s shrill mockery broke the silence. Maldrag and Zellara both jumped. But, as pronounced, the bodies remained in their critiquing poses.

Zellara shook her head. She couldn’t say it because she still wasn’t talking to Varani, but this wasn’t art. Just because the nobles could afford it didn’t make it good. Sometimes more...was worse.

Maldrag and Varani went off to kick the doors. They kicked open door after door until they reached the far end of the gallery. This door shuddered open to a sprawling bedroom complete with a rainbow-feather boa-draped shrine to Shelyn, goddess of music, art, beauty, and love. A couple in a paired sun and moon mask and nothing else slumped on the floor. They’d been tied to separate bedposts, their holes plugged with red wax candles. But at least without the clothes everyone could see them breathing.

An elf in a sweat-streaked coat of gold and white makeup laid back on the mattress with their skirts hitched around their waist, knees up. They raised their head just high enough to see the three Maidens over the ruffled waves of their skirts. 

Jolisti squealed. One hand clenched in the sheets over their head as their curled toes dug into the bedcover. The other rammed the bottom of a squat red candle in and out of their twitching, squelching anus.

Zellara, Maldrag, and Varani watched as still as the corpse statues as Jolisti’s hips bucked. Their hole swallowed the candle down to the short, white wick. They rode a groan from the base of their diaphragm up through their arching back and into their throat. Their cum dribbled like white wax onto the mattress.

Jolisti tugged on the candlewick and eased the thick wax out of their ass with a gasp. They let the candle drop and roll across the floor. Maldrag stopped it under her boot.

“Hey...Queen’s Handmaidens here. Everything alright here?”

Jolisti chuckled even as they struggled to sit up on their arms.

“Yes, sorry. Murder just makes me so fucking horny.”

Zellara’s crossbow thunked in her limp hands. The bolt punched Jolisti straight between the eyes, completely burying itself in their brain.

“Z, what the actual fuck?”

Zellara threw up her hands, flinging the crossbow. Maldrag and Varani both jumped as it thunked against the floor despite the bolt’s premature discharge.

“They said they were the murderer! How am I the bad guy?”

Varani pinched the bridge of their nose.

“Because that’s all they had time to say, marshmallow brains!”

“Ok, ok, well what about them?” Zellara flung her too empty hands at the Carowyns. “They’ve got to be some kind of accessories or at least witnesses.”

Varani tore the sun mask off Lord Carowyn. He’d been blindfolded, his nose and ears stuffed with red wax.

“Fucking. Perfect.”

\--/--

As Wicker neared climax, his swelling claspers engorged in Ran’s throat. She coughed and choked on the blockage cramming her wall-to-wall. Her head jerked back, but Wicker with his head to the canopy and his fingers in her hair kept her pressed to the hilt in a steely grip. 

Ran flailed a hand up his chest and twisted his nipple. Wicker’s head lolled down, moaning. His half-lidded eyes met hers. She could only grunt and wheeze around his twin claspers.

The water pulsed. His cum, as bitter and salty as brine and as ropey as kelp, spurted and oozed down her throat. He gripped her hair in one hand, the base of his claspers in the other, and slid her head off his dick.

She winced at the gluey spurt of cum onto her cheek and lip. Wicker’s claspers remained engorged and would continue to discharge sperm for forty minutes up to an hour, the merfolk’s knot. 

A rope of cum spurted onto her neck. Her gaze travelled up Wicker’s fully hardened shaft, far thicker around than Cinnabar’s clenched fist. His cum oozed down the dive between her collarbones. Her eyes went wide.

“You’ve already knotted. You should be inside me. I don’t know if I can take you like this.”

“Just give me an hour and then we can fight.”

He leaned back against the bedpost, wrapping one hand behind him for a hold. The other gripped his claspers, which continued to shoot white ropes into the water. They opened netlike and tumbled when the water pulsed with his pleasure. 

Though the wave pushed Ran away, the undertow drew her back and her hair into the path of a sticky net. She let it stick. She drifted up to him until the ridge of her tail brushed his. He groaned and pulsed but his hand smacked the bedpost behind him.

“Don’t. Don’t tease me right now. Step off or fuck me, but don’t tease me.”

Ran chewed the inside of her cheek and nodded. She turned her back to him, coiling her tail with his. His coils tightened around hers. 

Wicker pulled her back against his chest. His hands roved over every dip and curve of her body, familiarizing himself with the new map of skin. He turned her and tasted her mouth, her neck, her tits. She tried not to squirm with her hands around his cock, slipping it into the thin, membranous sleeve. It shrunk tight to the form of his swollen claspers.

He rubbed fish oil onto the fingers of one hand and curled around Ran to coax her open. She dipped her fingers into the oil and did the same, rubbing them over the tight lips of his cloaca. Her fingers and tongue had the advantage here. Wicker was already seeding. When his mouth opened to her sucking, thrusting kiss, he couldn’t help jerking up from her cloaca, one hand snatching her head by the hair, and pulsing into the water.

He moaned and yanked her out in front of him. His free hand guided the blunted tips of his claspers to the lips of her semi-opened hole. Despite the rigidness that remained in her cloaca, the coils of her tail only writhed in his at the solid touch.

Ran reached back with both hands and set her fingers on the edges of either scaled lip. She bit her lower lip against the tear and peeled her mouth open for him.

Wicker’s finger brushed the back of her trembling hand.

“Hey,” he rasped breathlessly, “we don’t have to go so fast.”

Ran’s back arched as she curled up to look back over her shoulder. She shook her head.

“I can’t wait any longer.”

Wicker shrugged and moved his hand from his dick to the ridges on the side of her hip. She whimpered and bucked as fist closed tight over the spines, but his grip on her hair and fins locked her in place.

Wicker pulled her head all the way back to his shoulder, completely bowing her back. The blunted tips of his claspers pushed between her fingers, her lips.

The skin of her cloaca stretched raw inside her. He didn’t stop. Ran writhed and wheezed at the solid fire forcing her walls as thin and taut as a paper sheet. He wasn’t halfway inside her when her white hot pain lanced her up and down her spine with pleasure.

Ran screamed. The water shook with her pulse. Her spasming shaft pulled Wicker with her. He cried out, fingers digging into her hair and scales, and rammed her again and again and again. Ran’s cries begged him not to stop.

He didn’t.


	14. Eels

Chapter 14: Eels

Wicker placed his hands on Ran’s hips and eased her raw hole off his claspers. Her spine gave a final shiver as the swollen lips of her cloaca closed up after him, leaving her with a slight bump in the scales. Both of their tails loosed their coils. 

Ran swam to the other end of the bed. She wrapped her arms around the bedpost, leaning heavily into the solid would as she tried to regain control of her breath. But the buzzing light that filled her body had completely replaced her strength. Her numb fingers unlaced. She yelped and drifted toward the wall of swarming eels still circling the bed, flailing for the dancing sheets.

Wicker grabbed her wrist. He pulled her back over the bed. He said nothing between ragged breaths as he tied his anchoring sheet around both their waists. They floated back to back up through the broken canopy and its swirl of ghostly white curtains in the water. His fingers slid from her wrist down to her fingers, brushing but not lacing.

“You should’ve let me die.”

It would’ve counted toward his siren count. He would’ve made Scylla.

“I thought about it.”

“But.”

“But, if you were up for it, I’d rather go another round with you.”

“What are you talking about? We had ritual sex and as soon as we’re ready we’re going to have ritual combat.”

“We can call it ‘ritual sex,’ but that’s not what it felt like. It felt like your partner had abandoned you. Even now, I can still feel how empty you are, how desperate you are not to be empty. Ran, do you know how much that makes me want to fuck you, fill you?”

“Oh, fuck.”

“Yes, fuck.”

Wicker turned around. His arms slipped around her waist. He rested the side of his face to her neck.

“I want to fill your throat with so much cum that it comes out your gills. I want your body on my cock so electrified with orgasm that you can’t move, that you forget to breath. I want my seed inside you.” 

He laid his hands over her womb.

“Ran, forget the combat. Would you be my partner?”

“No.”

His body jerked off of hers as though he’d been the one electrified by eels.

“No?”

He grabbed the sheet around their waists and pulled the knot loose.

“Then die.”

Wicker shoved her back toward the swarm. Ran’s tail lashed and she whipped around. He’d dived down for his trident. Her back hit a curtain. It billowed up in front of her.

The three steel heads of Wicker’s trident tore through the sheet. They didn’t stop until they’d pierced into Ran’s stomach. The water pulsed with her scream.

She shoved one arm between two arms of the trident to keep it from completely running her through. The other flailed at the curtain in front of her.

On the other side of the curtain, Wicker’s silhouette tightened its grip on the trident shaft. He lunged, crushing her arm to her chest. She never heard the dislocating pop of her elbow. 

The heads of the trident punched through her back. She wheezed blood into the water, staining the white sheet with her cloud. Black blurred the edges of her visions. With the last of her waning strength, she batted the curtain out of her face.

Wicker’s eyes, narrowed by the hunt, met hers. Her mouth spread in a weak, red-leaking smile.

“Don’t move.”

His eyes glazed over. The strength sapped from his grip. Ran extended her arm out and bumped the heel of her palm against his forehead.

Wicker’s fingers slipped off the trident. He drifted backward off the bed and into the wall of eels. 

The eels jerked away from the frozen merman. Their tails flicked his skin, but he remained still, helpless. The eels swam closer. Closer. They swarmed.

Hundreds upon hundreds of teeth latched into his skin. The violence broke Ran’s hold on his mind. Wicker screamed, pulsing the water. A massive electric shock ripped the scream from his throat.

The eels chewed through his skin and burrowed into his paralyzed body. A red cloud bloomed from out from the swarm.

Ran shut her eyes and grit her teeth. She pulled the heads of the trident out of her leaking stomach.

The eels broke apart in burst of red and chum, shooting past Ran and out through holes in the broken bow. The jaws of a fifteen-foot-long shark snapped shut through the bodies of over a dozen wriggling eels. Their severed halves lashed in death throes over Wicker’s hole-riddled corpse.

Ran’s gaze locked with the shark’s.

“Wait!”

Bluetooth roared.

“Master!”

The shark dived at her. Ran shrieked and curled over her wounded stomach.

“You’re a shark! You don’t need a master!”

A massive wave crashed into her. Her back slammed into the broken wall. But no jaws closed around her. Ran raised her head. Her nose brushed the shark’s snout.

“Wicker. Was. Friend.”

Ran kept her eyes on theirs though she didn’t try the spell again. There was too much emotion in Bluetooth but conflict, too. She shook her head.

“Did you ever say ‘no’ to Wicker?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Wicker would be sad. Angry.”

“You can say ‘no’ to a friend. Wicker was only ever your master.”

“No.”

“Bluetooth, what did you call him?”

“...Master.”

The light and clarity died in the shark’s eyes. Ran gingerly placed her palm on the side of Bluetooth’s snout.

“I’m sorry you had to hear it from me, Bluetooth, but I’m glad you heard it.”

The shark pulled back from her hand. It turned tail and drifted back toward Wicker’s floating corpse. Its head swiveled back just enough for one bottomless black eye to meet hers.

“Take Wicker’s bag. It has something you like.”

“Ah, what would that be?”

“Shiny.”

\--/--

As the newest member of the Handmaidens, the quarantine priests processed Zellara last. By the time she joined Maldrag and Varani on the other side of the two-way brief/debrief mirror, Field Marshal Kroft was already half an hour deep in questioning the ‘witnesses.’

Lord and Lady Carowyn, nobles as they were, had snagged the friendliest of the interrogation rooms. They sat on plush velvet chairs swaddled in sterilized silk robes and quarantine-approved fluffy slippers. Kroft sat on the other side of a round wooden table whose center had been dug out and replaced with a delicate bonsai tree. A gold and crystal mini-bar in the corner beckoned interrogees to drink from its secretly non-alcoholic spirits. The two-way mirror on the other side of the room was disguised as a window to a magical vista that changed scenic backgrounds every twelve minutes.

“What’d I miss?”

Maldrag, leaning against the gray, unpainted stone wall, shrugged.

“Nothing much--”

“Like we didn’t see that coming,” said Varani.

Zellara’s face flushed. Maldrag uncrossed her arms to wave a dismissive hand.

“We saved someone--nobles, sure, but that’s something.”

Maldrag summed up what little Kroft had gathered from the lives saved. After the execution orgy, the Carowyns and Jolisti returned to the manor to throw their own masquerade orgy. Three days into the party, Jolisti offered to show them the pleasures of sensory deprivation.

“I still can’t believe neither of the Carowyns used air-quotes,” said Varani.

“They were speaking in the heat of the moment,” said Maldrag, her elbow nudging theirs.

“I’d say they were balls-deep in it,” Varani nudged back.

“Ok, great, I get it, I saved the worst witnesses possible.”

Varani’s grin dropped first. They flung their arm out at the lord and lady.

“Those aren’t witnesses. You saved a couple of walking dildos. Congratulations.”

Zellara’s hands curled to fists. She opened her mouth. An ear-splitting squeak of metal on metal lanced straight through to the back of her eyes.

Ran shivered in the doorway, wrapped in threadbare but quarantine-approved blankets. Zellara stepped to one side and Varani to the other as she walked straight to the tinny metal table and plunked two waterproofed boxes down. Both had been unlatched, definitely by the priests.

Maldrag raised the lid of the first. A dead rat laid overtop of mound of silver coins.

“Ah.”

Zellara raised the lid of the second. It contained a rat’s nest of parchments, invoices. Each one had been sent from a party by name of ‘B7’ to a party called ‘R.’ 

Maldrag and Varani shared a look.

“What? What?”

“One of the dildos mentioned they tried to invite Jolisti’s pal Rolth to the orgy,” said Maldrag.

“I know that name.”

Everyone turned to stare at Ran.

“That’s the necromancer who acquired Sandones’s son.”

“Fuuuck,” Varani muttered.

If they’d hung around that disgusting lair longer, they might’ve had the chance to stop Rolth, to stop this whole plague before it’d started. But Gaekhen, Sandones’s son, would definitely have died. So, priorities.

Zellara flung her finger in Varani’s face.

“Ha! They aren’t walking dildos--they’re talking dildos!”

Maldrag high-fived her.

“What the fuck is a talking dildo?”

Kroft, stony-faced, stood in the open doorway flanked by a visored stranger. The soldier wore muted gray armor like that worn by Sabina at the execution, but a longsword hung from their side and a sword from their back. A sky blue plume bloomed from their helm.

“I have no idea,” said Ran.

“Whatever. Ran, I’ll debrief you later. Maidens, all of you come with me. The Queen has made a decree.”

Zellara followed the others out of the room, a seed of unease roiling in her gut.


	15. Believe in the Heart of the Cards, Or Don't

Chapter 15: Believe in the Heart of the Cards, Or Don’t

Varani followed Kroft and the others at the back of the line, fingers laced behind their head and neck. They squinted in the light of the afternoon sun as Kroft brought them to the citadel’s outdoor assembly, an auditorium carved into the stone of the Great Pyramid itself. The red-and-silver-armored Korvosan guard, Hellknights with their black spikes, and the Sable Company with their griffins had already filled all but the top row of the stone benches. 

The Handmaidens tromped past waving banners of the Korvosan flag all the way to the top. Before they could sit, Kroft stepped behind the podium of the stone stage below and spoke into the magicked voice amplifier.

“You know why we’re here today. Plague has come to Korvosa.”

It’d struck the slums of Old Korvosa the hardest. Whether or not it had affected any of the Korvosan nobility, Kroft never mentioned. Varani would’ve bet good money they hadn’t worried for a city second. Those rich bastards probably had their own private clerics on-call in all of their townhouses. 

Crimson curtains behind Kroft opened to either side. Row after row of visored soldiers in muted gray with a sky blue plume in their helms stood at attention. Their commander at the front of the rows removed their helm. Sabina Merrin--shocker.

“Queen Ileosa has brought together an elite group of soldiers, her Gray Maidens, to deal specifically with all matter concerning the plague. No longer will you be placed in danger of contagion--the Gray Maidens will handle it. That said, they’ll need your utmost cooperation. Any orders from any of the Gray Maidens are to be considered as binding as that from your superior officers.”

The four Handmaidens shared the same look as everyone else in the auditorium. The Gray Maidens weren’t some godsend treatment for the plague. They were walking martial law.

“No balking. You’re the guards of Korvosa and this city needs you now more than ever.”

For all Kroft’s fine words, the grumbles of the guards continued well after the Field Marshal dismissed them back to their posts. Varani filed out into the stone aisle with the others.

“Show of hands, Maidens, who else needs a drink?”

“I have to go back for debriefing,” said Ran, still wrapped in a blanket.

“Maldrag? Zellara?”

“Yeah, just fuck me up,” said Maldrag.

Zellara shook her head.

“Yeah, I need something after that, too.”

The three headed down to the Three Rings tavern. The windows were still out, covered with sturdy, translucent tarp, but Theandra had cleaned the place up to its usual standard of homely disarray. 

Varani, Maldrag, and Zellara grabbed a torn but comfy booth in a dark corner and ordered their drinks by the gallon. Two jugs in, Varani slapped their Harrow cards on the sticky tabletop.

“Alright ya papercunts, the jig is up. What the Hell’s going on?”

They slid five cards into a spread and flipped the first. It was the giant red ant, the Queen Mother, same as the one they’d drawn for Sandones. Maldrag and Zellara stared at the card, dropping into a silence that laid itchy and sweltering over Varani’s skin. They shrugged through it and flipped the next card.

The Queen. The Queen. The Queen. Varani’s hand wavered over the back of the final card. They sure as fuck didn’t have four copies of the Queen Mother in their deck. They slammed their palm onto the cardback and slid it across the table to Maldrag and Zellara.

“You guys take a look. If it’s the ant bastard I think it is, don’t tell me.”

“But you’d still know--”

Varani cut Zellara off with a stern headshake. Maldrag peeked under the card. She set it down and passed it back without a word.

“Fuck!”

Varani swept the whole deck off the tabletop and onto their lap. The cards thwipped back and forth between their hands under the table.

“Alright, so, real question, what’s a piece of paper know anyway?”

“Varani, I don’t believe any of that future-telling crap,” said Maldrag, “but that was still weird as fuck.”

“Weird?” Zellara squeaked. “That was physically fucking impossible. That’s gotta be a sign of...something, I don’t know.”

“Yeah, that my cards are conspiracy theorists.”

“I don’t blame them! The money plague--but only on cheap silvers. The Gray Maidens who came out of nowhere. I thought we were the Maidens!”

“They’re the martial-law Maidens, we’re more of the international-spy-of-mystery Maidens,” said Maldrag.

She drained her whiskey in a single swig and dumped the glass topside down on the table. Varani pointed, eyes and mouth wide.

“Drunk! We’re collectively drunk!”

“I’m not that drunk! Theandra! Theandra!” Zellara shouted over the other clamoring patrons.

Theandra approached the table with a broom in one hand and an empty tray in the other.

“Did you see Varani pull at least four ant cards out of their deck?”

“Like some kinda disgusting card trick, yeah. You’ve got a rabbit card in there. Use that one next time.”

“Thank you,” said Zellara, giving the other two a pointed look.

“Then I couldn’t see your disgusted face,” said Varani without skipping a beat.

Theandra rolled her eyes. She left the three in a sobered silence. No one could argue against the ruling of the barkeep.

“My little sister got sick. She’s better now, but all my family’s in Old Korvosa. If I can stop something from happening before it happens, I’m gonna do it.”

“That’s the most vaguely threatening I’ve ever heard you say.”

“Go off, Varani!”

“Alright, alright,” said Maldrag, spreading her hands. “Z, if you’ve got a plan, Kroft owes me at least a day off.”

“I do have a plan, but I don’t want to talk about it in front of anyone who’s not--”

“A papercunt conspiracy theorist?” offered Varani.

“I’m leaving!”

Maldrag patted Varani’s shoulder but stood up with Zellara. The two left Varani to sit in their cups. The light faded from the other side of the tarp. Varani moved to slouch in an armchair by the fireplace as Theandra stoked the flames.

“Theandra?”

“Yeah.”

“Would you fuck me?”

“No. And it’s not because I don’t think you’re attractive--you’re stupidly pretty. It’s because I know you.”

“Ah, the proverbial friendzone.”

“Varani, we’re barely friends. You and everyone you’ve brought to the bar with you’s the same. You’re my best patron, so I hate to break it to you, but you’re just an asshole. Thanks for coming to my talk.”

Theandra left Varani, too. Despite the noise in the bar, it was warm and comfortable on the overstuffed chair by the fire. Varani drank themself to sleep in minutes.

\--/--

Admittedly, Varani and their eye-gouging hangover arrived late to work but at least they’d arrived. Ran was the only other Handmaiden in Kroft’s office the next morning, and yet the Field Marshal still glowered at Varani.

“I thought Maldrag and Zellara would be with you,” said Ran.

“Zellara called in a quarantine day. Maldrag did about the same,” Kroft said dismissively. 

She never took her glower off Varani. Varani cupped a hand in front of their mouth and took a sniff. Ah. They smelled like a week-old shit pickled in shots and sweat. Ran somehow managed to keep a straight face. 

“Have either of you ever been to Lavender Place?”

They hadn’t.

“It’s a perfumery. They make Lavender’s Luxuriant Liniment.”

Scratch that. Varani knew of the stuff but didn’t use it--though they had to consider it after all their drunken nights and stinking days. It was a perfume/tonic/elixir that supposedly restored the user’s youth while waking them up in the morning, powering them through the day, and keeping their pits fresh.

“They’re not working with the Arkonas are they? Alchemizing some kind of super-soldier serum?”

Varani didn’t catch Kroft’s muttering but it sounded a lot like ‘if only.’

“No, they claim to have a cure for blood veil.”

“Blood veil?” asked Ran.

“The plague.”

The owner of Lavender Place, Logri, a Chelish immigrant, had just put out a new product called ‘the Cure.’ According to the lavender-scented ad Kroft handed them, the Cure soothed aching joints, tired feet, sore hands, and throbbing heads. It took the pain out of cuts, burns, bruises, and blemishes. It smelled like chastity, confidence, and respectability, and tasted like  
honeyed dewdrops over snow clouds. Most miraculously, however, it dispelled blisters, minimized swelling, calmed the complexion, and erased all symptoms of blood veil.

“‘Free Imp with Every Purchase’?” read Ran.

“I checked--imp-hawking isn’t illegal, but it should be. That’s besides the point. The Cure’s a sham and you need to persuade Logri to stop selling it.”

“Or what? I’m guessing it’s passably legal as well?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Or ‘else’. Gotcha.”

With Ran doing her little hypno-thing this mission would be a cinch. They didn’t even need Maldrag or Zellara. The lovebirds could suck it.


	16. The Lift

Chapter 16: The Lift

Zellara and Maldrag had decided to make the most of their day off by beginning their investigations before dawn. It was easy to find the barracks of the Gray Maidens. The first guard they talked to and apparently everyone else who hadn’t been off on a mission knew the Queen boarded the Gray Maidens in Castle Korvosa’s underground, just above the dungeons.

The two Handmaidens waited in the shadows of the corridor by the stairs and simply tailed the first Gray Maiden to leave the barracks alone. The Gray Maiden took no precautions to hide their path through the city to Korvosa’s western coastline, even nodding their helmed head at those who’d nodded first. They stopped at a large warehouse on West Dock that bore a recently painted sign: ‘Hospice of the Blessed Maiden,’ entering through the front door.

Maldrag hummed from where she crouched behind rope-netted crates. Zellara, crouching behind the crates across from her, shook her head and shrugged in stealthy question. Maldrag waved her across to explain in a low voice.

The Handmaidens had seized this warehouse from the noble House Arkona not long before Zellara had joined their ranks. They’d found all kinds of smuggled contraband in the warehouse’s secret lower level, accessible only by a single cargo lift. From the constant comings and goings of quarantine-suited priests and patients on stretchers, Zellara couldn’t imagine the lower level had stayed secret and unused. Many of the red-rashed sick simply staggered in through the front doors themselves.

“This is actually, probably, the least suspicious thing we’ve seen.”

“True, but we didn’t come all this way out here on unpaid leave not to have some sneaky fun.”

The two giggled and hatched their plan of risk-free attack. Maldrag would go in through the front and chat up anyone she could find idling in the lobby, priests on break or even those in line for treatment. Zellara sneak in through the loading dock and try to find the old cargo lift.

“What happens if we get caught?”

“You won’t get caught, shadowmaster. But we’ll definitely have to go in for quarantine after this, so if you find anything interesting, investigate the crap out of it.”

She didn’t have to tell Zellara twice. 

Zellara snuck down the line of crates to the nearest pile to the old loading dock. A thick metal chain and padlocked closed off the heavy wooden doors that faced the gravel beach, but the windows remained unshuttered. The rays of light that made it through the layer of dust barely chipped away at the darkness inside the loading bay. She stepped into the darkest spot of shadows and set her fingertips to the blackened cobblestones.

“Take me away.”

The shadows slinked up Zellara from foot to head, as close as a second dark and ghostly skin. When the shadows peeled away, Zellara crouched on the other side of the window in the deepest shadows of the loading bay.

The scent of expensive woods and their sawdust filled the air above and between a maze of barrels and crates. A web of ropes and pulleys crisscrossed the ceiling, the cables thick enough to suspend a whole net of barrels. Empty cages stood by a leather-flapped doorway in the southwest corner. A true set of wooden doors with little windows above their centers dominated the northern wall.

Zellara crept toward the real doors first, standing on her toes to peer out into the...what had once been the main hold of the warehouse had been converted into a single, mass sickroom. Tight rows of low, stained cots crammed the stone-floored hall from wall to wall without an inch of space between the groaning, wheezing, or completely still victims of blood veil. Zellara could smell the nose-burning, throat-pickling blend of stringent alcohol, stale sweat, and humanoid waste through the tiniest gaps along the window.

She reeled back, coughing and choking into her forearm. None of Gray Maidens or priests in their plague masks and rubbery, quarantine bodysuits came to examine the noise. There was more than enough coughing on the inside.

Zellara’s breath returned, but a cold sweat set in over every inch of skin. The glimpse into the mass sickroom might as well have been a glimpse at the future of Korvosa, Zellara’s Korvosa, anyway. None of those patients were here because they could afford real care and insurance from re-contracting the disease--only the nobles could manage that. If the plague got any worse, entire slums would be wiped out.

Zellara curled her sweaty hands to fists. She snuck away from the north side of the loading bay down to the southwestern leather flaps. She peeled the flaps apart to a narrow gap and peered into the dark.

Dingy office doors lined a narrow hallway crammed by cubbies and wooden lockers packed with parchment. At the far end of the hall stood a large wooden wheel and a pair of metal doors that could slide up into the wall and down below the floor.

Zellara held her breath and walked through the leather flaps. She kept her back flat to the wall, treading lightly to keep the floorboards from squeaking. She stopped under the first door and stood up on her toes to peek through the dingy door window.

Blood, bile, and worse bubbled away in bulbous beakers and twisted tubes on a long, black table. Parchments depicting close-up views of humanoid body in grisly detail papered every single flat, vertical surface. Pins and flags pierced the papers like the war maps of a veteran campaigner.

Though disgusting and lacking any proper organization, nothing in that makeshift lab seemed particularly incriminating aside from all the health code violations. Zellara sank back down to the floorboards. She sighed, disappointed, and crossed to the door on the other side of the hall.

Rows of white-sheeted beds lined the wall of the room, every bed restraining its occupant with thick leather straps. Simple wooden worktables covered in fluid-filled beakers, glass tubes, and burners stretched down the center of the room. Curls of rainbow-hued smoke billowed down from a censer overhead.

A Gray Maiden sat on a rickety wooden chair in the corner of the room while a quarantine-suited priest with a clipboard stood over a patient. The priest unclipped a shiny scalpel from the top of the clipboard. They gave the blade a little twirl in their palm. Then drove it down through the patient’s glazed eye.

Zellara clapped her hands over her mouth. She wasn’t fast enough. The Gray Maiden shot to their feet. The priest’s plague-masked head snapped toward the door.

Totally, irrevocably fucked, Zellara broke into a flat run. She threw herself at the wooden wheel. Metal screeched on rusted metal.

The door of the hell-ward burst open, Gray Maiden and their sword in the doorway.

“Move, you rusty cunt!” she hissed, yanking the wheel as hard as she could.

The doors barely cracked six inches. The Gray Maiden charged down the hall.

Zellara squeaked and hefted herself between the doors. 

The lift shaft was empty. Her sweaty fingers slipped off the metal. Zellara screamed and fell.

\--/--

Varani and Ran could tell they were closing in on Lavender Place by the twisting line of commoners and the poor stretching four blocks down the jam-packed shops of Summoning Street. Most of the folks in line appeared healthy, but some hacked and others bore splotchy red rashes. Those who weren’t sick wouldn’t stay healthy for long in such close proximity.

They walked around the line to the narrow, amethyst-windowed storefront. Ran froze, pointing. A few of the patrons leaving by the side door grabbed one imp-holding birdcage each from a small tower stacked in the alley. They smiled and waved.

“We’re not here to save the imps--who are devils, by the way. Any life here has gotta be better than whatever they had back in Hell.”

Two large, purple-suited bouncers, one human, one half-orc, held heavy saps on either side of the front door. 

“There, that’s you, that’s all you.”

Ran approached them from outside the line. A chorus of boos, curses, and complaints called both bouncers to attention. They loomed nearly two feet over her. Varani watched from the middle of the street, well out of the way of Ran’s mind-fucking eyes.

“Every customer must stick to the queue.”

“My associate and I are Queen’s Handmaidens. We had an appointment with Logri.”

An ice-cold, dick-shrivelling shiver ran down Varani’s spine as the bouncers’s eyes went as glazed and unfocused as a dead fish’s. Like puppets on strings...from her eyes...they waved the folks at the front of the line to squeeze to the side to make way for Ran and her associate.

Varani followed into a menagerie of heady scents that twisted through the cramped, amethyst-lit perfumery. A dizzying assortment of fragile bottles from gaudy ceramics to knife-edged crystal lined the shelves and storefront windows. Behind a maze of ribbon-strewn tables and racks all stacked with bottles ran a long counter with a swooping banner that read: ‘The Cure: Either You Got It, or You’ve Had It.’ Hundreds upon hundreds of simple clay phials with round, magenta stoppers hung from the wall in little metal hooks.

A heavyset, purple-aproned Chelaxian with pale skin, black hair and eyes brightened by vibrant purple makeup sat behind the countertop. The small namecard pinned to their apron strap read: ‘Hello, My Name Is Logri, They/Them.’ 

“Go for it, Ran,” Varani whispered out of the side of their mouth.

“My commands only hold someone for a day or so.”

Fuck. Mental domination was out. Lying was back in. 

Logri gave the Maidens a nose-crinkling smile.

“A Lavender welcome to ya! May I take your order?”

“Actually, Logri, my associate and I are Queen’s Handmaidens,” Varani grinned back, holding up their crimson blade pendant. “The Queen’s heard good things about your Cure--”

“The Cure.”

“The Cure, right. So we’ve come to perform a quick lab inspection, make sure everything’s up to standard.”

“Oh, of course! I can get you some free samples with that. You Maidens just come right this way. How’s the Queen doing, by the way?”

“She’s getting by.”

While everyone else just kinda languished in the aftermath of a riot-induced shortage of funds compounded by the plague come to town. Just fucking peachy.

Logri took the Maidens behind the counter through an abandoned, likely bank-seized apartment behind the shop. Most of the doors and windows had been boarded over, and a thick layer of dust coated every surface except for a well-tread, branching path. They followed Logri down the right branch.

The salesperson unlocked the door to a heady, dusty pink cloud of cherry blossom perfume. Delicate floral tapestries all in pinks and purples draped the walls. A table sculpted with swirling ivy leaves bore flower-shaped Carowyn candles and a fragile porcelain tea service. 

As beautiful as the wannabe noble’s tearoom all was, it wasn’t a lab. Varani opened their mouth to speak, but Logri only waved at the antique purple sofa with a flourish.

“We can’t talk business without tea--that’s just not the Chelish way. Come sit a spell.”

They grabbed the teapot and pranced off toward the kitchen. Possibly. Logri seemed eccentric enough to attach their tearoom to a volatile laboratory. Varani sat gingerly, ready to bolt at the first sign of explosion. 

Ran sat beside them on a round, lace-trimmed pink pillow, staring at a framed portrait of the Queen. Her eyes dropped to the floor when Varani caught her looking. Varani sighed. One more person to add to their expanding list of papercunt conspiracy theorists.

Logri returned with herbal-scented steam piping out from the little teapot’s spout. They poured three cups before sitting on an overstuffed, magenta armchair across from the Handmaidens. Varani and Ran nursed their cups in their hands. Logri sipped first.

“So, do you lab inspectors take coin or is there a particular product you’re after? I know shiver’s been on short supply since someone squashed that spider Devargo, but it’s no trouble to cook up something similar with the right materials.”

Varani sipped. The tea was as bitter as alcohol but with about as much kick as hot water. They spooned in several cubes of sugar from the tea set.

“How much are we talking?”

Ran quirked a dark brow but stayed silent.

“Five.”

Varani spat their tea. There was no way a perfumier made enough money to drop a cool five thousand at the drop of hat. Logri must’ve taken over the shiver business after Varani sunk Devargo at the pier. They placed their teacup down on the saucer on the table.

“Ten.”

“Ten.”

Definitely a drug dealer.

Ran murmured and shifted in her seat beside Varani. She set her teacup down as well and crossed her legs tight. Varani caught themself staring at pinched fabric between her legs--weird--and yanked their eyes back to the still-smiling Logri.

“You mentioned something about samples?”

“Shiver, honeydust, or did ya actually wanna try the Cure for yourselves? As premium customers, I’m inclined to mention it’s bunk--river water, mostly.”

Varani wiped the sweat beading on their brow.

“Let’s bring the Queen back a copy of the Cure just to--”

Ran whimpered and shuddered. She dug her fingers into her arms, trying and failing to stifle a moan. Just the sound was enough to send a visceral tug down from Varani’s gut to their dick.

“What the fuck…?”

Logri gingerly pried themself up from their seat and backed away from the tea table. Varani jumped to their feet. Ran fell off the sofa onto the pink shag carpet.

“Ran!”

“Peachleaf’s bitter but it’s great for bloodflow. Funny thing, ya throw in heat, sugar, and it turns into a powerful aphrodisiac. You and your merfolk enjoy, now.”

Logri dashed out the door, slamming it in Varani’s face. They shook the handle. Locked, but not a problem.

“Ran, stay back, I’m gonna…”

They made the mistake of looking back.

Ran laid chest to the floor, humping the heel of her palm and mewling like a strangled cat. Varani went hard as a rock, the peachleaf in full effect. They cringed and doubled over, groaning.

Ran rolled over onto her back. Varani’s eyes met hers.

“Fuck.”

“Come here.”

There wasn’t any magic in her words. Varani obeyed anyway.


	17. The Answer is Always Fire

Chapter 17: The Answer Is Always Fire

Pure adrenaline shot straight to Zellara’s brain. Time slowed, seconds stretching almost visibly in front of her as she pressed her palms together. Shadows leapt at her call off the walls of the lift’s empty shaft at her. They closed around her, swaddling her in weightless layers. When they peeled away, Zellara dropped from three inches off the lift floor. She hit the ground rolling on her side, right into the metal walls of the basement level.

“Ow,” she muttered, glancing up at the top of the shaft.

A Gray Maiden and quarantine priest both stuck their heads through the doors above. From their lack of reaction, neither could see in the dark. The priest raised their hand and called forth a light.

Zellara shrank against the metal doors.

“Oy! You!”

“Fuck.”

She smacked her palm against the floor. The black, broken pentagram of the Abyss sucked the surrounding shadows into its form under the hazy light of the priest.

“You stop that right now!”

The shadows rose up into the horned, lanky form of the babau. They stretched stretched one hand out to the floor at their side. A second, broken pentagram poured out from their slime-dripping fingertips.

The priest and Gray Maiden didn’t stick around to see the second babau rise. The light vanished with them.

“Kill anything that sees you.”

The two babaus nodded in shadow-venom-dripping silence. They scampered up the elevator shaft on all fours. Screams filtered down the lift shaft in hollow echoes. Zellara just hoped they’d keep the massacre contained behind the leather flaps.

Zellara yanked at the cables attached to the inside of the wheel for the lower doors. They scraped open jerk by jerk. She opened them only as far as she needed to crawl through.

She landed on her feet in a low, stone chamber filled with cabinets and benches. Metal, beaked plague masks hung from pegs on the wall. She cracked open a cabinet. Unlike the lift doors, it opened without a squeak. Hooded rubber suits hung from hangars over a line of high boots. 

It was some kind of dressing room for the priests--everything about them rubbed Zellara the wrong way. She didn’t see any of their holy symbols here, but she doubted they belonged to any of the gods in Korvosa. She didn’t have time for a more thorough search, especially not with her shadow demons on the loose.

Zellara opened the door. She closed it. Her hand left cold sweat on the door knob. But there weren’t any other doors in the room. She could either go back up the lift to the massacre or go forward.

Zellara grit her teeth. The door opened into a glass-lined grave of undead. Dozens and dozens of them lined the walls, their rotting faces sneering and broken fingers clawing at each other. Even the floor was glass. The rotting bodies laid underfoot, shattered bones and splintered limbs knocking hopelessly against the floor. 

It was a hall. Besides the closet’s, there were two more doors between opposite lines of undead bodies. Zellara tiptoed under the first door, peering through the window at its center.

Eight iron beds stood within, their mattress-less frames threaded with worn manacles and stained leather straps. Several bound occupants in various states of consciousness, poor sods. Between them stood several small tables, each strewn with gore-soaked pans, flasks of mysterious fluids, and all manner of cutting instruments. A vaguely humanoid stain covered much of the eastern wall, as if all the blood from a body once held there had exploded out in a single violent eruption.

If there was no one behind creepy door number two, Zellara promised herself she’d come back to free them. The second door didn’t have a convenient window. She crouched down to look under the door but couldn’t see anything beyond the first few floor tiles. Zellara stayed low, held her breath, and pushed open the door.

A stinging, chemical cloud whooshed into the hall. Zellara’s eyes burned and watered, but she clamped her sleeve over her nose and mouth before she could sneeze or cough. The fumes bubbled out of  
Three huge metal vats, each a head taller than Maldrag and twice as wide. A sturdy series of catwalks ten feet off the ground stretched over and around the vats. Above, a mosaic of whtie, black, and green stone depicted a giant half-corpse in black veils dancing in a field of the dead, dying, and undead. 

As Zellara held her nose and stared up at the mosaic with watering eyes, everything clicked. This was a cult. A cult of death and undeath had come to Korvosa with the plague and was now feeding on the city. Or someone had let them in. 

Whatever the cultists were cooking up in these vats couldn’t be good. Zellara had to get a sample. As she crept up the metal scaffolding as quietly as she could, she spotted a simple door between two of the vats.

“How did they fit all this underground at the coastline?” she muttered.

Zellara stopped over the nearest vat and its putrid green-brown foam. She pulled out a little metal water bottle, drained all the water, and tied a lightweight line of rope around its sides.

“Please don’t be acid.”

She lowered the bottle below the foam. When she pulled on the line, it came back up, heavy with whatever noxious liquid was below and a whole belt of green-brown bubbles stuck to the rope. Zellara shook the line in her hand, jerking the bottle up and down until the bubbles popped. Green-brown, phlegm-like liquid splashed onto the floor.

“The fuck…?” came a voice with a hollow, metallic echo.

Zellara yanked the bottle into her hands, toxic splashes be damned, and stepped into the shadows before the two plague-masked priests in the open doorway looked up her way. The shadows warped her into the darkness beside the only other door in the room. As the two priests clanked up the scaffolding, Zellara tried the knob--unlocked. She slipped through the crack.

\--/--

In the heat of the drug, Ran and Varani tore the clothes off each other. Ran’s breasts crushed against Varani’s chest as they sucked the air from each other’s throats. Ran let out a needy moan in Varani’s mouth. They fell to the carpet.

Varani, rubbing their erection over Ran’s twitching clit had a sudden, visceral jolt of inspiration. They pushed up off Ran’s shoulders, smearing the sheen of sweat on her skin. Ran whined at the space between them and reached up grasping. Varani pinned her wrists to the ground, grinning and shaking their head.

They got off Ran and ransacked the piles of clothes. Ran sat up on her elbows and watched, pouting, until Varani came up with her boot. They pulled on the boot, which didn’t quite fit, but they wouldn’t be wearing it for long.

Varani set the toe of the boot between Ran’s legs. Ran bit their lip and jerked a nod. Varani stepped onto her cunt and ground down onto Ran’s clit.

Ran mewled, her back arching from the base of her spine under Varani’s foot all the way to top of her shoulder blades. Her palms slammed the floor, and she clawed the carpet over her head.

“M-more.”

Varani couldn’t wait for her to ask nicely. Ran’s breath hitched as they wedged the bootheel into the swollen mouth of her cunt. They shifted their weight onto the ball of their foot. Ran screamed.

“Fuck, Ran, fuck.”

“V-Varan-ni,” Ran mewled.

“Yeah?” they rasped.

“C-cum in my mouth.”

Varani threw off the boot and dropped to their knees. They straddled Ran with their dick in her face and their mouth over her cunt. She tasted like saltwater. They licked her and sucked her, getting her wetter, tighter, as they pounded their dick down her throat.

Ran wheezed onto their shaft and swallowed down over their head. Varani squawked at the sudden, massive tug into Ran’s devouring squeeze. She sucked the cum straight out of them, swallowing and swallowing it all down.

Varani rolled off of her, sweating and buzzing to the roots of their teeth. Ran laid still beside them, dripping onto the carpet. Varani rolled up onto one forearm and absently kissed the side of Ran’s thigh.

“Thank Desna that’s over. Was there something we were supposed to be doing?”

“Logri.”

“Yeah, they’re long gone by now.”

“They had a lab.”

“Let’s see what they left.”

The lab inspection was back on. As soon as the Handmaidens got their clothes back on. They did so keeping their eyes thoroughly averted.

Logri had locked the door, but its hinges were no match for Varani’s blast of wind. The two cut across the abandoned apartment to the door at the end of the other well-trodden path. The floor tile inside was sterile enough to pass an actual lab inspection by those quarantine priests swarming the Great Pyramid.

The lab smelled of spices, flowers, oils, and cleaning fluid. A sealed tun of liquid filled a corner of the room. Several large casks and two stacks of box, one holding ceramic vials with magenta stoppers and the other a collection of crystal perfume bottles, squatted next to it. A kitchen-y nook with sinks, burners, and an oven of some sort held another crate filled with broken shards of glass of every color.

Varani and Ran opened the cabinets. Magically cooled air seeped out. Large quantities of every product downstairs and then some--the drugs--filled dark glass tubs with precisely detailed labels on their lids.

“Grab everything you can carry.”

Ran picked up a tub, reeled back precariously, and set it down on the counter.

“Scratch that. Get it in fun-size.”

They scooped samples into the small, magenta-stopped vials. Once they’d filled their backpacks, Varani opened the tun and the casks. The tun contained water. They closed the tun. As the two were leaving, Varani dragged two casks of oil with them. They kicked them down into the room. The fragrant oils spread over the quarantine-grade tile.

“Any last words?”

“I don’t think Logri is listening.”

“Just checking. Anything you wanna add?”

“Fuck you for smelling me out.”

Varani nodded and shrugged.

“Yeah. Fuck you.”

They raised a bird. Arcs of flame flipped out from the base of their fingers into the lab. The pools of oil lit. The flames raged up to the ceiling almost immediately, waves of heat bursting from the doorway and blowing out the windows.

Varani and Ran ran back through the door behind the counter. The storefront was in chaos. With Logri and the bouncers absconded, the four-block-long queue had massed into the store. The customers pushed, jostled, and shoved through broken glass and overturned shelves to grab everything they could carry.

“Get out! Get out!”

Nobody listened. Then flame rolled out from the behind the counter. The crowd screamed and threw themselves out of the nearest hole--door, window, or broken wall.

“The imps!”

Ran looked back toward the back of the store. Varani grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the open storefront window. Ran pulled back.

“Not worth it!”

Varani threw their palm out at the flames. Wind burst out in a human-sized gusting sphere. It knocked them both through the window onto the street. 

But the wind also fanned the flames. Fire exploded out over them, knocking the remaining glass shards out. They shattered onto the cobblestone.

Varani and Ran crawled to the other side of the street before standing up. They sat side-by-side on the curb of the sidewalk watching flames and black, perfume-scented belched out of every crack in Lavender Place. A fire bell tolled at the far end of the street.

“It wasn’t too late.”

“They were imps, Ran. Devils.”

“Monsters.”

“Yeah.”

Ran said nothing more. She stared into Lavender Place’s funeral pyre until Varani stood and patted her shoulder. It was time to go.


	18. The Boomerang of Fate

Chapter 18: The Boomerang of Fate

Zellara shut the door as quietly as she could behind her. The eye-watering reek only strengthening. She held her sleeve over her nose and mouth and turned from the door to the circular chamber rising to a high dome.

Seven basins jutted from the walls held in evenly spaced alcoves around the room. Each were filled to the brim with a fluid--blood, bile, milk, piss, and what Zellara guessed to be sweat, tears, and cum. She could smell all of them.

In the middle of the floor was a wide pool of still water. A statue of the same being on mosaic, human above the waist and skeletal below, stood at the center of the pool. On the floor at the feet of each basin were several small, empty boxes identical to the ones that Ran had found on the sunken ship. Zellara shook her head. If only Varani were here so she could rub it in their pretty, non-believing face.

“Beautiful, ain’t it?”

Zellara jumped into a ready stance at the deep, low voice over and beside her. She looked up over her sleeve at a tall, gaunt Taldan with long, spindly fingers and a head of lank blond hair gathered into a little bun on the top of their head. They wore a stained and crusted lab coat.

“Let me guess--you’re Rolth.”

“Hey, you know who I am! That’s kinda flattering. Yeah, I’m Rolth, he/him in the flesh,” Rolth spread his arms like he was some monstrous god’s gift to this world.

Zellara glanced at the door, torn between fleeing for Maldrag or trying to end it all here. She inched toward the door. Rolth swooped between her and the door in a blur of white and stains.

“Look, I’m gonna be straight with ya. I don’t get many new, conscious faces around here. So, listen, if you want a tour, ya know, I could--”

“Show me around while bragging at length about your great ideas for killing Korvosa?”

“Woah, hey, I’m not killing anybody. I’m just cooking. Some real inspired cooking, but--”

“Wow.”

Zellara set one palm to the temple floor. Nothing happened. The babaus must’ve still been carving their way through Grey Maidens and quarantine priests upstairs.

“Whatcha doing there?”

Zellara stood with a nervous chuckle, wiping her palms on the sides of her pants.

“Just, uh, checking my bootlaces before we, uh, climb up the lift shaft for that amazing tour.”

“Pfft, climbing’s for chumps,” said Rolth, squatting down to hook one arm around Zellara’s waist and pull her to his side. “Let’s fly.”

Zellara screamed as they zoomed out from the nasty temple into the vat room and out into the nasty hallway of the undead. Rolth only laughed. Zellara reached one hand behind her back.

They whooshed up the lift shaft, Rolth’s laughter echoing empty and hollow in the metal tube. Zellara broke into a cold sweat in his arm. He didn’t notice. Without any slow or stop, he snapped a finger at the lift doors as they zoomed close.

“Abracadabra.”

The doors screeched open to a hall painted and crammed with death. The twisted, mangled bodies of priests and Gray Maidens formed a second floor tiling. They draped every set of cubbies and filled every broken cabinet, staining every crumpled sheet of parchment under them.

Rolth pulled up to a sharp stop just under the ceiling. His jaw hung slack. His pupils dilated without a trace of fear. Zellara with her side against him could feel him hardening under her foot.

“Eesh.”

Her crossbow shunked from behind her back. The bolt, fired at such close range, pierced Rolth from the soft underside of his jaw straight through the cavity of his skull and out through his eye. He screamed, not yet dead.

Zellara screamed. He threw her to the body-cushioned floor and clamped his hands over his eye and the hole under his jaw. Zellara wasted no time.

“Go dawgs sic em!”

The babaus burst out from the lab in a spray of red and dripping venom. They charged up the sides of the walls and leaped at Rolth. 

He flung his red-stained palms at them. Cold rays of pure enervation exploded out at Zellara and the shadow demons. 

The draining magic vanished as suddenly as it’d been conjured. Rolth hit the body cushions with a gurgle, the front half of his skin torn from his flesh. Zellara cringed as his erect penis went flying. It landed straight up in the crook of a quarantine-priest’s armpit.

Zellara shook off the murders and left the demons to it. Their conjured time would run out in seconds anyway. She ran out of the crime scene.

\--/--

The dingy hospice lobby reeked of alcohol and chemical medicine. Six penniless Korvosans huddled in stiff metal chairs against the wall, waiting to have their numbers called. Maldrag leaned one elbow on the long wooden reception desk, ignoring the muffled moans from behind a leather curtain. Instead, she focused on the dwarven receptionist fidgeting in front of her. The woman wore thick rubber gloves and had to speak through three layers of protective scarves.

“Well, no, if you came back tonight there’d be just as many of us on duty. It’s never quiet around here. But my shift ends at noon, so I’d be free for--” she stared past Maldrag’s shoulder.

Maldrag turned around. Zellara, coated in dirt and a liquid that was likely blood, flailed both arms at her from the other side of the lobby’s sliding glass door. Maldrag’s pulse pounded in her throat at the sight, but she kept her smile on for the receptionist.

“Looks like my friend’s gotten into a bit of a scrape--”

“Abadar’s balls, no kidding!”

“I’d better go see what this is about. Thank you so much for your time, Brunhilda.”

“Oh, no, um, thank you!”

Maldrag scrounged for every ounce of willpower to keep from running out of the hospice. She waited with the patience of a divine as the glass doors of the quarantine hall slid open. Without making eye contact, she turned Zellara about face with a hand on her shoulder and marched them back out to the docks. As soon as the Gray Maiden door guards were out of sight, they dove behind a pile of crates.

“Z, are you ok?” she asked, voice hushed with caution and ragged with fear.

“I’m fine, physically.”

“But…?”

“I didn’t--I didn’t have a choice. Maldrag, oh my gods, I did something really--” her voice cut off with a snivel.

Maldrag took Zellara by the shoulders and pulled her into a hug tight enough to help stave off whatever was eating her. Zellara shook like a leaf in her arms, but her voice was quiet and steady. She told Maldrag everything that had happened inside the sham of a hospice. Maldrag’s pulse pounded harder with every word.

“So Rolth’s dead, but there’s no way of knowing if my shadow demons got all the witnesses.”

“Z…”

“Y-yeah?”

“The receptionist saw you. The hospice is gonna keep this quiet--they have to--but there’s gonna be an investigation. They’re gonna put two and two together.”

“I don’t wanna die,” Zellara sobbed into her shoulder.

Maldrag said nothing. She held Zellara for a long time. She couldn’t hold back the weight of Zellara had done. She could only hold on until Zellara cried out all her tears.

\--/--

Varani hadn’t planned on starting the drinks hard when they turned up at the Three Rings that afternoon. Then they saw who Maldrag and Zellara had brought with them to the booth. Ran walked right into Varani’s backside.

“What is it?”

“Theandra, can a I get a Death in the Afternoon?”

Ran peered around their side. Maldrag, Zellara, and Field Marshal Kroft raised three glasses at the two of them. Theandra set the cocktail down just before Varani finally eased their ass into the seat. Varani drained it in a single, unbroken draught, and slammed down the glass.

“Ok, great seeing you guys. I’m out.”

“No,” said Zellara, stabbing her finger at Varani. “You sit the fuck down. You shut the fuck up. You listen.”

Varani raised their slightly buzzing fingertips and said nothing. They somehow got more silent as Zellara told them what happened at the hospice.

“Damn, Zellara, you really stepped in it--”

“How are you still missing the point?”

Varani groaned. They were back on that Queen shit. Again.

“Ok, yes, you’ve turned up concrete proof that there’s corruption going on at the highest level of government. I just don’t want to be involved.”

Zellara stood up on her seat and pounded her palms against the table.

“So what? You’re just gonna throw me under the wagon?”

Kroft leaned forward, raising a finger.

“If I may? Guys, you’re all already, technically involved. I’m literally a witness here. You’ve only got two options. One: we come up with a way deal with this, together. And not tonight, I’ve already had like four glasses of wine. Two: you are complicit.”

Varani dropped their pointy chin into their hands. They sighed and raised their glass out to Theandra. Kroft raised four of hers.

“Can I--we get another?” asked Varani. “Thanks.”

“Is that--you’re with us?” asked Zellara.

“I guess, yeah.”

“Me too,” said Ran.

“Thank you,” said Zellara, placing her hand on Ran’s.

Varani received no such gesture of appreciation, of course.

“Right, so, what’s our plan for Desna-damned treason?”

“First, keep your voice fucking down,” Kroft slurred.

“I think it’s better for all of us if planning doesn’t happen tonight,” said Maldrag.

“That’s good,” said Ran.

She pulled her pocket watch up from under the table.

“I only have fifteen minutes left anyway.”

“Fifteen minutes? You’ll never make it to the coast from here,” said Maldrag.

“I thought I could rent a room here like Varani. And a tub.”

Varani waved their hand.

“Don’t waste your coin. Just come up with me.”

Maldrag, Zellara, and Kroft shared a look.

“What?”

“Nothing,” said Kroft. “Just glad to see you’re taking this whole stand together or hang separately thing seriously.”

“Oh my fucking god. You’re welcome, wine mom. Ran, come on, let’s go.”

“Now?”

“Meeting. Fucking. Adjourned.”

Varani stormed up the stairs with Ran on their tail.


	19. Problem Solve This

Chapter 19: Problem Solve This

Maldrag

Maldrag looked at Zellara looking miserably up at Ran and Varani disappearing up the stairs. She placed a hand over Zellara’s, completely covering it. Zellara pressed her lips tight, but the line of her mouth wavered. She blinked hard.

“Hey.”

“H-hey.”

“Varani’s a flake, but we’re not gonna let anything happen to you. I’ve got a plan.”

“Me too,” said Kroft, raising a finger for emphasis on...Maldrag wasn’t a hundred percent sure.

“O-k. You wanna go first?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Zellara.”

“Yeah?”

“You,” Kroft emphatically jabbed her finger in the air, “should stay with me. At my place.”

That was a better drunken plan than Maldrag had expected. They had to find a permanent way to deal with the Gray Maidens and the cultists, but until then, Zellara needed a place to lay low. She couldn’t be safer with the Field Marshal herself.

“And I was thinking that I would stay with your family.”

“They’re in danger?”

“Maybe not. But when they can’t find you, they might try to draw you out.”  
Maldrag hated to scare her girlfriend any more than she was already, but there was no telling what kind of tactics the people who practiced human experimentation and chemical warfare would use. 

Zellara nodded, shoulders slumping. She held her sides. Her body chains must’ve dug into her skin.

“Woah, hey, don’t go dumpster diving in the...dumps. Whatever. You can still work.”

“What?” said Maldrag and Zellara.

Kroft waved her hands for no discernable reason.

“Yeah, absolutely. You’ll be at my house. I’ll give you the mission there, you meet up at the site. Boom. Done. Just don’t go to the Citadel. You’re good.”

“Go home, you’re drunk,” said Maldrag, shooing at her.

“I’m not that drunk. But I will go home. Because I want to. Zellara?”

“Just let me say goodbye.”

“You’ll see her at work--”

“Just wait for me outside, please.”

Kroft gave Zellara a mock salute and weaved her way out of the bar. As soon as she was out of sight, Zellara threw herself into Maldrag’s arms. Her shoulders shook, but she didn’t cry. Maldrag kissed her black curls.

“It’s gonna be ok.”

“Don’t make bullshit promises.”

“Look at me.”

Zellara looked, her eyes wide with fear.

“If they want you, they’ll have to go through me and Kroft first. And that will never happen. You want to know why?”

“Why?”

“Because we’re the best at what we do.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too, Z.”

She watched Zellara and Kroft leave in silence on the other side of the window, a molten hot seed of wrath burning in her chest. The Queen had gone too far and Kroft knew it, too. There were ways to get the Gray Maidens and the cultists permanently off Zellara’s trail, but all of them meant Zellara and possibly her entire family leaving Korvosa for good. For once in her life, Maldrag was too selfish even to put that option up for discussion.

No. If worse came to worse, Maldrag would rather take the fight straight to the source. 

\--/--

Zellara

Zellara followed Field Marshal Kroft from a distance of one human body length as her boss staggered up the seven flights of stairs to her apartment. Kroft lived a twenty minute’s walk from the Citadel in an old but well-kept tenement building just outside the edge of middle class Korvosa. The walls were thick enough to muffle conversations, but Zellara could hear the cries of children and the barking of dogs all the way up.

“Home sweet home,” said Kroft, unlocking the door.

She pushed it open with the toe of her boot. The stench of unwashed body on unwashed furniture rolled out in a musty, dusty haze. Zellara sneezed and swore and threw her sleeve over her nose and mouth.

“Ok, rude. I invite you into my house…”

Kroft trailed off into silence. She sneezed.

“I’ll open a window,” she muttered, wiping her nose on the back of her uniform sleeve.

Kroft strolled into the apartment in the direction of the window. As she passed the pungent, sweat-stained couch, her stroll faltered. She flumped face-first onto the cushions.

Unacceptable. Zellara would die before hiding out in a literal dump. She marched into the apartment and went straight for the kitchen. She ransacked the cabinets, nearly tearing up with joy when she found a bucket, rags, brushes, and cleaning solution--all unused--under the sink and its erupting volcano of moldy dishes.

Zellara slapped her palm to the sticky floor tiles.

“Go, go, shadow demons!”

She summoned five fleshy dretches from the Shadow Realm of the Abyss into Kroft’s kitchen. She passed out the cleaning supplies, arming everyone except the one dretch on dish duty. 

“Clean around the human if you have to--I want this place spotless.”

Zellara herself took the balcony, which was unimaginably filthy for such a narrow space. Wet laundry draped the arms of a jungle gym of broken furniture piled up to the ceiling. A wet, moldy mound of clothes had formed at the center of the heap, fed by the constant drip.

Zellara separated the clothes onto the balcony’s rail or into a burn pile before tackling the furniture. She took the separate pieces apart and cauterized them in cleaning solution. 

The scrubbing and re-stacking took the punch out of her fears as well as the smells. Yes, this was a bad situation. It was worse than when her family had gone into life-changing debt. But she wasn’t alone this time.

Zellara blinked hard. She couldn’t hold back the tears, but she was smiling when she wiped her eyes. Her friends had her back. It was all going to be okay. It had to be. It had to be. She sniffed and scrubbed harder.

\--/--

Varani

No sooner had Ran followed Varani through the door than she stepped out of her boots. Varani looked away as she scooted her pants down her legs, but the light, fabric thump brought back the flurry of memories they had been trying to suppress all evening with a vengeance. Varani turned a full one-eighty away.

Theandra stood in the doorway with a large wooden tub under her arm. She quirked an eyebrow at Varani but mercifully didn’t make a single snide comment. Varani stepped out of her way.

Theandra set the tub down. She gave Ran the most unsubtle, full-body glance-over that Varani had ever seen in or out of a brothel. Ran completely missed it.

She eased herself into the tub and rested her feet on the rim. As Theandra emptied buckets from the second floor water pump into the tub, Ran’s legs drew together from the thighs to the ankles. Her fish-pale skin sloughed off at the water’s touch and spread out in delicate whorls of sea foam.

Sleek teal scales glimmered below the surface of the water. Ran’s tail grew out much longer than the length of her legs, coiling over the side of the tub and onto the floor. The thin, shining fan of her tail was the last to emerge, spreading out like a bird’s wings in flight. The position of the fins and ridges made the tail look like the body of some other sea creature that had swallowed Ran to her waist.

Theandra left with a wink. Varani slammed the door shut behind her.

“Is everything ok?” asked Ran.

“Yeah. Great. Fine. You?” they asked, leaning back against the cool, non-judging door.

Ran looked away toward the window and into the lamplit streets below. If she wanted to go back to the ocean, it was way too late for second thoughts. She’d be stranded tail-out until morning.

“I haven’t been myself lately.”

It wasn’t at all what Varani had expected to hear. In all honesty, they hadn’t noticed any difference. They felt the slightest twinge of guilt, seeing as how they worked together. And today in such close proximity--Varani cleared their throat.

“What’s up?”

“My partner is missing.”

Ran’s neutral expression never changed, but her fingernails dug into the wood of the tub.

“The Queen lied to me.”

Varani rocked on their heels off the door. They crouched by Ran’s side, facing the window as well. They had no idea Ran had been in a steady relationship, much less who her partner was, but helping a friend was helping a friend. Varani could count all of those on the fingers of one hand.

“We’ll find your partner.”

Then they could all team up with Maldrag, Zellara, and Kroft and what? Petition the Queen until she started acting in Korvosa’s best interest? Realistically, no. It’d be a gods-damned assass…

Ran lightly bumped her skull on Varani’s as she leaned the side of her head against theirs. Varani froze. Ran’s hair was half wet and half dry. It smelled like a breeze out at sea. Her skin was cool but not clammy. Varani held their breath to keep from inhaling it.

Ran turned without moving off Varani’s skin. The line of her nose pressed along their cheek. Her breath prickled Varani’s neck.

“You smell warm.”

“Ran, I--”

“If you want to fuck me, do it while the water’s warm.”

Varani thought about it. They really did. In the end, they realized they’d wake up hating themself anyway, so they might as well make a party out of it.


	20. Play Nice

Chapter 20: Play Nice

Maldrag

Zellara’s mother, Tayce, tried to pack Maldrag with several large, round loaves of fried bread as she left for work. Maldrag declined, claiming she wasn’t hungry so early in the morning. Dhatri gave her a knowing wink three feet over Tayce’s shoulder.

By the time Maldrag reached the gravel shore of Old Korvosa, the sun peeked over the ramshackle skyline of the dockhouses. Ran waited for her in a shadowed alley between two tenements. She could’ve just as easily waited in the open street. A mere two weeks after the blood veil plague struck the slums and the whole ‘quarantine zone’ had turned into a ghost town. The only sounds that followed them to Spider Palace were disembodied, hacking coughs.

It wasn’t hard to see why a mob survivors had rallied behind an authority figure in this time of crisis, but they couldn’t have chosen worse than Devargo the Spider King. After he’d lost his stock of shiver, the Arkonas started supplying him with stimulants instead, a whole rainbow of party drugs. He’d gotten his whole mob hooked. Now they’d follow him to the death like a horde of raving barbarians.

Maldrag and Ran walked into a solid wall of stench. Maldrag flinched and snorted but kept walking. Ran remained unphased even as the litter in the streets grew from simple shit, rubble, and refuse to decomposing bodies. Feral dogs, bird-mosquito chimeras, shingle spiders, and worse scuttled over their new playground/buffetground. 

Maldrag and Ran followed the body road down to Spider Palace. Devargo and his hopped up minions had vandalized an entire block of tenements into a single structure connected by rope bridges through blown-out windows and toppled walls. There at the opposite end of a dock, a hundred blood-and-shit-stained poor folk stood in a ring, stamping their feet and waving torches around a chosen few who pole-danced on upturned pitchforks. Despite the drugs or perhaps because they were so amped up, the mob noticed Maldrag and Ran immediately.

“On my signal,” Maldrag whispered from the corner of her mouth.

The mob charged.

“Everybody?” asked Ran, ducking behind her.

The mob unsheathed battleaxes to go along with the pitchforks and torches. Maldrag didn’t have time to respond. She swung her drum around in front of her and slammed her palm to the skin. 

The single, low note exploded out on a wave of magic. It whooshed through the mob and over the trampled bodies. The wall of scent cleared.

The front line of mobbers slowed and staggered at the sudden freedom in the air. Those behind bumped into them like a line of weapon-wielding dominoes.

Maldrag continued to beat her drum. She sang over the wounded cries.

“Buddy you're a boy make a big noise  
Playin' in the street gonna be a big man some day  
You got mud on yo' face  
You big disgrace  
Kickin' your can all over the place  
Singin'

We will we will rock you!”

Maldrag clapped her hands over her head. The mob quieted as they looked up at her.

“We will we will rock you!

“Buddy you're a young man hard man  
Shouting in the street gonna take on the world some day  
You got blood on yo' face  
You big disgrace  
Wavin' your banner all over the place

We will we will rock you  
Sing it!”

Maldrag pointed both hands at the mob. Another wave of musical magic whooshed out, following the line of her finger guns. 

The mobbers straightened up and shouted back: “We will we will rock you!”

Ran crept out from behind Maldrag’s back. As Maldrag sang, she pressed herself flat to the tenement wall.

“Buddy you're an old man poor man  
Pleadin' with your eyes gonna make  
You some peace some day  
You got mud on your face  
Big disgrace  
Somebody betta put you back into your place

We will we will rock you  
Sing it!”

The mob roared: “We will we will rock you!”

“Everybody!”

Ran broke into a dead sprint for the doors of Spider Palace. The mob, now clapping and slapping knees in time with the Maldrag’s drum never noticed. Instead, they took it away:

“We will we will rock you  
We will we will rock you!”

“Alright!”

That worked out far better than Maldrag had expected. She had a whole line up prepped to keep them entertained while Ran extracted Devargo. Hopefully, alive. Realistically...Maldrag pounded her drum. Bum. Bum. Bum.

“Another one bites the dust!”

\--/--

Varani

“Varani, you’re late!” a voice hissed from the shadows of the ten-foot stone wall of the Arkona’s palatial townhouse.

Varani gave Zellara a dismissive wave along with too-fresh memories of banging Ran in the cloaca this morning. That had definitely been a mistake. They could still feel her tight, fleshy wetness sucking their dick deeper, deeper.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine. Fucking peachy,” they chirped.

Zellara rolled her eyes and stuck out her hand. She pulled it back before Varani could touch them.

“You washed that hand, right?”

“Zellara, I swear to--”

“You didn’t, did you?”

“I’m clean.”

They had to be. Ran’s slick was salty enough to cure beef. They were practically sterilized to quarantine standard.

Zellara sighed and took Varani’s fisting hand. Shadows wrapped around the two of them. The whole world went screwy, spinning Varani’s stomach up into their throat. The shadows peeled back. They fell, gagging, into an immaculately trimmed lawn.

They raised their head for a worm’s eye view of golden pillars reaching to the sky in the distance. The pillars supported a domed roof with a golden spire. High windows and higher towers rose from the wings behind the dome. Zellara silently shook her head.

Varani clambered to their feet. Zellara had shadow-warped them into a courtyard masquerading as a mini jungle. Foreign bird calls filled the air, heady with the scents of a dozen tropical flowers. Color exploded from every corner of the courtyard in the wings of the birds, the petals of the flowers, and the tiles of a massive fountain.

Yeah, that fountain was a mistake. Its main water spouter thing was a stone pillar entwined by two cobra statues clutching green gems between their iron fangs. It drew attention to all the wrong places and none of them to the graceful curves of the water. It didn’t help that there was a life-sized, jade statue of an elephant rearing its tusks and trunks opposite the cobras.

“I kinda feel more nauseous now than when you yanked the floor out from under me.”

Zellara blinked owlishly.

“What?”

“Nothing. I just...agree with you. For once.”

“Are you Handmaidens always this insulting?” asked a voice from above.

A tiger-headed humanoid in white and burgundy robes fanned themself over the golden rail of a balcony twenty-five feet above the miraculously even lawn.

“Maybe half the time?” said Zellara.

“We try,” said Varani. “So, you know who we are. You wouldn’t happen to be Bahor Arkona, would you?”

“Would you believe me if I said no?”

“No,” said both.

“Ok, that’s fair,” said Bahor, hanging their head.

The fan dropped from the balcony. Bahor clapped their hands together in front of their chest and raised their head.

“Water, elephant, attack!”

A grinding screech pierced their eardrums. The jade elephant stomped down from its platform, shaking the earth. Its jade trunk trumpeted even louder over the grinding. Varani and Zellara clamped their hands over their ears. A flock of birds shot out from the trees in colorful escape.

The fountain exploded into a thirty-two-foot-tall geyser. A fish-like face made entirely of water, its maw lined with row after row of needle-y teeth stretched up the length of the roaring, spraying column.

Zellara slammed her palm to the ground.

“Go, go--”

A thirty-foot wave surged down from the side of the geyser. Varani tackled Zellara into a roll. The wave crashed where they’d stood, the immense weight pounding a ditch into the lawn.

“Oh,” Zellara squeaked.

The jade elephant screeched and charged.

Varani and Zellara dove apart. 

The elephant stampeded between them, but its swinging, semi-precious trunk, knocked Varani across the back. They fell face down in the grass.

Varani spat dirt. They sprang into a crouch with a grunt.

“I’ve got Waterboy,” they shouted to Zellara across the lawn.

“You’re leaving me with the fucking elephant? Me?”

“Feed it to your demons.”

A massive wall of water roared out from Waterboy, drowning out Zellara’s shout. Varani dove further out to the side. But this time, they were ready.

Varani rolled up, hands crossed at the wrists. They flung one hand out at Waterboy and one at the elephant.

“Bam.”

A line of lightning snapped out at both attackers. Waterboy crushed inward as it seized the whole geyser in its crackling grasp. The elephant reared up and trumpeted but seemed otherwise unphased. If distracted.

“Go, go, abominations!”

The lightning winked out with a trumpet-drowning thunder. In the ear-ringing silence, three gaunt, shadow-dripping demons threw themselves at the elephant.

A shadow fell over Varani. A thirty-foot-wave rushed down to meet them.

A fourth demon slammed into their side.

Varani grunted and flew into the grass. The shadow venom burned like acid. They dragged their burning side through the dirt, sloughing it off. 

Waterboy’s wave arm rose up from the new ditch. There was nothing left of the demon but its shaped crushed into the lawn.

“Eats demons for breakfast, got it,” they muttered, hearing returned.

A bolt of lightning shot out from the tip of their finger. The lightning crushed Waterboy down, but as soon as the spell ended, it spouted right back up to full strength.

“Zellara!”

“What!”

“Lay off the elephant!”

Zellara pulled her demons back. The elephant charged after them.

“That way! That way!” Varani flung a flurry of pointing fingers at the geyser.

The elephant had already closed in. Zellara screamed and ran with the two remaining demons.

The jade elephant skidded and ground another ditch into the dirt but rounded the curve. It trumpeted and picked up its trampling pace.

Varani timed the dash. Zellara screamed in close. Varani shoved one palm out behind them.

“Blast off!”

Wind blasted out behind them. At fifty miles per hour.

Varani screamed and careened into Zellara, catching them in the blast. They zoomed right past the elephant’s swinging trunk.

Waterboy threw down a wave. It was fast, but not fifty-miles-per-hour fast. Varani and Zellara crashed through the wall of falling water. It slowed them down. Some.

They flew into a grove of tropical trees. Leaves smacked and branches snapped them to a stop. They tumbled down through vines and more branches.

Varani hit the leafy, tropical carpet with an oomph. Alive. Zellara sat up beside them, spitting foliage. Varani whooped and smacked her on the back.

“We did it!”

Zellara squinted at the rubble of the broken fountain and shattered jade elephant at the center of the ruined lawn. Varani held up a hand before she could speak.

“With teamwork.”

Zellara sighed but came up with the tiniest, grudging smile.

“Go team.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song credit: Queen


	21. A Message from the Queen, a Message for the Queen

Chapter 21: A Message from the Queen, a Message for the Queen

Ran

Ran’s footsteps echoed on wood and stone under a roof of spiderwebs. The dust clung as thick as a winter frost to the silk. With the walls of the different tenements knocked down and the web evening out the different heights of the ceilings, the whole space seemed to be the single, vast lair of a King of Spiders who was an actual, giant spider.

At the very back wall of the lair stood an open-air balcony. A painted canvas roof shielded the floor and webs below from rain and sun. Wood and web held the canvas in place. The sun shone through the canvas, painting the floor with a blurrier version of its glassy dream spiders.

A tall, pale human in black leathers with short black hair shaved on the sides looked down from the balcony. Their piercing blue eyes met Ran’s. They vaulted over the balcony rail.

Ran crushed her instinct to leap back out of the way of a falling body. Devargo didn’t fall. He glided down on strands of silk from a swarm of spiders on his back. They scuttled and scattered off as soon as he boots touched the ground. Ran bowed with half a smile.

“It’s an honor, King of Spiders.”

“Thanks,” he half-smiled back. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m a Handmaiden of the Queen. She’s sent me to see you.”

“The last Handmaiden I met blew up an entire pier, so forgive me if I ask you to get the fuck out of here.”

“That would be a shame because I’m...quite a fan.”

“Of the spiders? Drugs? Doing the mob’s work?”  
“Of the power.”

Devargo stepped up until there was only a hair’s breadth between them. Ran didn’t back down. She kept her dark gaze coolly up against his heat. A muscle flexed in his jaw. His blue eyes dilated despite himself.

“What do you do to the powerful?”

Ran set her fingertips on his shoulders.

“I make them kneel.”

Devargo’s eyes narrowed with a low, feral growl. But at the lightest pressure from her fingers, he sank to his knees.

Ran lifted up the skirt she’d worn for just this occasion. Devargo tore the underwear off her body and buried his face in her cunt, fingers digging into the soft flesh of her ass. She knotted the fingers of one hand in his hair and guided his head where she wanted his tongue--clit, slit, and cunt.

He was a good, hard licker, but it wasn’t enough. She tugged his hair.

“I need something inside me--no, stay down there where I can see you.”

“You really are a controlling--” he cut off at the jerk on his hair.

“Why are you talking when you should be sucking?”

Devargo sank his growling mouth onto her clit. Ran bit back a hungry moan. He pushed three fingers through her swollen lips, and something worse escaped her throat--a whimper.

She could feel Devargo’s mouth twist into a smirk around her clit. He had her, and he knew it. His fingers teased the rough patch over the mouth of her cunt as he sucked her into a quivering frenzy. He pressed into her wall, and she mewled at his grinding touch, walls clamping down on his fingers.

Without removing the hand impaling her, Devargo reached up and grabbed the front of her shirt. He dragged her down until her head was at his level and filled her mouth with the taste of her own briny slick.

They pulled apart, breath ragged. Ran reached down and grasped his wrist. She pulled him out of her with a grudging shudder, avoiding his gaze. But Deverage hadn’t released her shirt. 

He turned her chin to face him with a sticky, slicked finger. She snarled at his smug, haughty grin.

“On your feet, King. It’s your turn.”

Devargo stood as commanded. Ran placed her fingertips back on his shoulders and walked him backward into a thick, sticky wall of web between two wooden pillars.

“Spread your arms.”

He raised them off his sides. Ran pressed one wrist to the sticky wall. She slipped two fingers under a thick strand of web and wrapped the strand around his wrist. The fibers clung tight to his skin. The other wrist received the same treatment.

Devargo flexed his fingers, testing the binding. He seemed surprised that it held.

Ran snickered. She sank down to her knees and unbuckled his belt with her teeth. Both his eyebrows shot up.

She nuzzled his dick through the rough fabric of his underwear. It hardened under her nose.

She bit the fabric, letting her teeth just graze Devargo’s head. A low, bodily growl rose in his throat. Ran rolled her eyes and tugged the underwear down below his balls. She sucked them into her mouth as soon as they swung free.

Devargo grunted, fingers flexing. The web held. He couldn’t touch her, and she knew it.

Ran went slow. She teased his shaft and head until his balls were as hard as his dick. His growls turned to grunted swears.

“Fuck, fuck you, you fucking--aghh!”

She sucked his dick to the hilt. The back of her throat squished against his head. Ran gagged, her whole throat clenching as she choked on his dick.

Hot, bitter cum spurted down her throat. She sucked him dry between her wheezing coughs. His head dropped back against the web with a sigh of relief. But there was no release for his wrists.

Ran turned her back to Devargo just long enough to check for any guards in the wings and draw the dagger sheathed in her jacket. Too long.

A strong forearm locked around her neck. A second pinned her arms to her sides. Devargo crushed her body against his.

“You Maidens are so. Fucking. Predictable,” he hissed over her ear.

Ran, gasping for air like a landed fish, couldn’t breathe, much less speak. The dagger clattered to the floor. Her numbing fingers scrabbled at his choking arm.

“Better. Now you’re gonna scream for me.”

He loosened his chokehold just enough for the air to rush back into Ran’s lungs. She wheezed, turning her head as far toward Devargo as she could. He was too tall--she could barely see over his cheek.

Devargo grabbed her chin and turned her head to the floor. A rippling carpet of spiders surged up. They crashed against her in a spiny, scuttling wave.

Ran screamed.

\--/--

Varani

Varani and Zellara searched the palatial manor for Bahor Arkona, finally rattling down a iron flight of spiral stairs not to a basement but an underground grotto. The air was cool and thick with water. A garden of fungi, lichens, and mold climbed up the high, curved walls to carpet the dripping ceiling.

At the center of the grotto, four bronze braziers lit a domed temple standing on pillars of tan marble. Varani followed Zellara, who kept them wrapped in shadow, all the way to the temple stairs. A tiger-headed humanoid had been carved into each of the pillars. They looked exactly like Bahor.

A statue twice as tall as the real Bahor stood over the altar. It held two, flag-draped lances across its chest. The left held the red flag of Korvosa. The right held the Arkona coat of arms, a golden chimera on black and white.

The real Bahor stood opposite the statue, their back to the two Maidens. Varani and Zellara gave each other a single nod. They kept to the flickering shadows by the pillars and approached stealthily.

The tan marble rippled like a sun mirage on either side of the altar. The ripples slithered closer and reared. Garishly hued scaly hoods flared around the hissing head of each sixteen-foot cobra.

“Change of plan,” said Varani.

They flung their hand toward the ground. A blazing ring of violet, twenty-foot flames sprang up around the cobras. They hissed and shrank toward its center.

Bahor screamed and pointed at Varani. A bolt of lightning shot from their clawed finger. Varani screamed as it lanced through their chest. They dropped to the their hands and knees, smoke tendrils curling up from their back. Stealth was out. Full-on magical firefight was in.

“Go, go, Dark Magician Girl!”

The shadows burst up from Zellara’s broken pentagram into the shape of a woman with horns, bat-like wings, and a long, sinuous tail capped with a small, heart-shaped fin. That was no Dark Magician Girl. That was a gods-damned shadow succubus.

Bahor screamed and pulled out a curved kukri in either hand. The succubus charged at them in a flying tackle. She hit with an echoing smack. The two spun into the air, slashing and clawing.

Varani pushed up to their feet. They cracked their neck from side to side.

“So...when did you pick up a succubus?”

“While I was at Kroft’s. But aren’t you and Ran,” she pressed the sides of both pointer fingers together.

“First of all, it’s an open relationship. Second of all--”

The two cobras, twined together, launched themselves up over the violet firewall at Varani and Zellara. The Maidens dived apart. The cobras split after them.

Varani turned in the air. They threw their palm up at their cobra’s human-swallowing maw.

“Not today, poison breath.”

A bolt of their own lightning shot straight down the cobra’s gullet. The cobra dropped with a sizzle and pop, smoking from snout to tail.

Varani rolled up to their feet, pointed ears ringing from the thunder. The second cobra squeezed Zellara in its coils. Varani’s hearing returned just in time to hear Zellara’s scream as the cobra swallowed up the little halfling.

Varani whipped out their sickle, blade catching blue flame. They pointed a sidewise fingergun at the heap of coils where Zellara was obviously not.

“Bitch better have my halfling!”

Lightning blasted at the coils. The cobra sizzled and screech. It lunged out at Varani, but the heavy lump in its throat left it rearing too slow.

Varani leaped. Their sickled hooked through the scales under the cobra’s jaw. Gravity dragged them down and the flaming blade through the snake’s underbelly.

Zellara burst out from the cobra over Varani’s head in a thick coat of spit. She hit the temple floor with a slimey roll and disgusted scream. The cobra splattered behind her, somehow missing Varani entirely.

Zellara squinted at Varani.

“How…?”

Varani just winked at her. They, too, had no idea. Not even Desna, goddess of, had enough luck to spend on casuals who doubted the divine Harrow.

Yet another scream filtered back into earshot. It cut off with a heavy, bone-crunching thunk as Bahor hit the stone altar back first. There was a smaller thunk as the rakshasa rolled off onto the floor, face-first.

Varani and Zellara approached, Zellara plucking off wet, ropey globs of spit. They crouched on either side of the body. Bahor was still breathing.

Zellara drew her crossbow. Varani placed their hand over the shoot-y bit. Zellara pointed it to the ground.

“Varani, if we don’t finish this, Bahor could possibly survive--I mean, it’s not likely, but still.”

“Yeah, but let’s just think for a sec. Who wants the Arkonas dead?”

“The Queen.”

“And who are we lowkey plotting treason against?”

“...oh.”

Zellara put away her crossbow. Varani sheathed their sickle. Together, she and Varani turned their backs on Bahor Arkona, enemy of their enemy, and left them to the mercy of Desna, only mostly dead.


	22. Carry On

Chapter 22: Carry On

Maldrag

At the first note of Ran’s scream, the doors of Spider Palace burst open. In surged the mob. Maldrag stood on their shoulders like the goddess of war herself with her Nice-Axe in one hand and pounding her drum with the other. She pointed her greataxe at Devargo and the spider-covered Ran and roared out in song:

“When I was a young orc  
My father took me into the city  
To see a marching band  
He said, kid, when you grow up  
Would you be the savior of the broken  
The beaten, and the damned?”

The mob with Maldrag at its head fell upon Ran and Devargo with thrashing dance. The spider swarm scattered for fear of being trampled. Ran cowered and screamed, throwing her arms over her head and neck for protection. Devargo bolted, but there was nowhere to run.

He crashed into a wall of frenzied limbs. The mob danced on, knocking him to their trampling feet. He too, screamed.

Maldrag leapt off her human perch with a mighty roar. The dancers parted as she struck the butt of her axe to the palace floor. The dancers froze, some in place. Silence rang out through the great hall.

Maldrag rose to her feet, singing as soft as a lullaby:

“And when you're gone, we want you all to know  
We'll carry on, we'll carry on  
And though you're dead and gone, believe me  
Your memory will carry on  
We'll carry on.”

One by one, bodies hit the floor. Snoring. There was no one left standing but the few within five feet of Maldrag--Ran, Devargo, and three very confused dancers. Maldrag caught their eyes and jerked her chin to the doors.

“Get outta here. And stop doing drugs.”

They fled on the wings of street amphetamines. Devargo ran as well, but Maldrag grabbed the popped collar of his black leathers. Ran grabbed her dagger.

“Don’t even think about it,” said Maldrag, wrestling his arms behind his back.

“You don’t understand--I only need two more kills to make Scylla,” said Ran, slashing for one of said kills.

Her dagger sparked against Maldrag’s Nice-Axe.

“You’re right, I don’t understand.”

“Just,” she slashed, “let me,” slash, “get this one,” slash.

Maldrag did not, hefting Devargo out of the way her blade as easily as one might keep candy from the grabby hands of a small child.

“Ran, I got two shoulders and no problem hauling both your asses back to Kroft.”

Ran snarled, taking Maldrag aback, but sheathed her dagger with a trembling hand. It was the first emotional outburst Maldrag had ever seen from her and over something as clear cut as murder. Or maybe not so clear cut.

Maldrag set Devargo down against a wooden post. She leaned one hand over his head in warning and rested the other on her hip.

“What does ‘make Scylla’ mean?”

“Really? Your gonna do this now?” said Devargo. “My fly is still down, by the by.”

“Great, maybe Ran can knock some sense into both our heads.”

Devargo shut his mouth, if only to keep Maldrag from the satisfaction of hearing him laugh.

Ran explained the Siren System, a game that was more than just a game to merfolk--it was a merit-based system of status. Only, the ‘merit’ was earned by seduction and subsequent murder.

“So, can I kill him?”

“Yeah, no, that’s still not happening, but thank you for explaining all that.”

“You’ve slain me with boredom--does that count?”

“Sadly, no.”

“Ignore him. Look, I get this system means a lot to you, but you’re a Korvosan merfolk now. Here in the city, we gotta put other priorities over killing--”

“What, like the laws of our beloved Queen?” scoffed Devargo.

“If you actually wanna die, fly boy, I’ll let her--”

“Nope. Shutting up.”

“Anyway, Ran, just think about it, okay?”

“Okay,” she sighed.

Thus, Maldrag hauled only one ass over her shoulder back to Kroft that day.

\--/--

Zellara

Ten feet from the Three Rings Tavern, Zellara ran out of patience with Varani’s indifferently late pace. They’d already waited until sundown for safety.

She bolted from Varani’s side and burst through the door. Maldrag was waiting on the other side. Zellara jumped into her solid green arms. Maldrag laughed and spun her around toward the table.

Kroft was elbow-deep in her cups beside Ran. Zellara’s smile shrank. She hadn’t seen Maldrag for days--not since the last mission. She almost wished Kroft would pass out and Ran have to run back to water just to get some alone time with her goddamn girlfriend.

“What up, I got a--”

Zellara jumped at Varani’s voice. She’d completely forgotten about them, but they could leave, too.

They didn’t, of course. Zellara scooted into the booth beside Maldrag and Varani beside Ran with Kroft there in the center. Kroft’s hand beckoned for their mission report while she finished off her wine bottle with a long, uninterrupted swig.

“--then my succubus dropped them on the altar to themself, I think? And we figured breaking their back was good enough, so we left them--”

“Hold up,” slurred Kroft, raising a palm. “You just left Bahor Arkona questionably dead?”

“Hey, you wanted less killing, more community service,” said Varani. “Community? Served.”

“That’s not--”

Maldrag’s fist slammed against the table, rattling the glasses.

“You left Arkona possibly alive?”

“Yeah,” said Zellara.

Maldrag put her hand over Zellara’s squeezing. Zellara’s eyes met hers. Both pairs dilated.

“Z, that’s so fucking hot.”

“Y-yeah,” she squealed, throat choked by her rising heat.

“I want you. I need you,” said Maldrag, standing.

“I need you too,” Zellara stood.

“Varani, can we borrow your room?”

“What?! Are you fucking--”

“Yes,” said Ran, “but only if we can use it, too.”

Varani’s jaw hung open but no sound emerged for several owlish blinks.

“Am I--is this really happening?”

Maldrag had already carried Zellara halfway up the stairs. Varani grabbed Ran’s hand and followed hot on their heels, leaving Kroft alone at the table. The field marshal raised her arm for Theandra.

“Check, please.”

\--/--

Maldrag pushed Zellara onto Varani’s bed, the force of her mouth on Zellara’s neck enough to keep her pinned as the half-orc stripped her naked. Maldrag let up sucking only to remove her own clothes. Zellara’s head spun from all the blood not swelling her crotch having been sucked off to the hickey on her neck.

Ran flopped back naked onto the bed beside Zellara. Both of her hands knotted in Varani’s hair, tugging their face deeper into her cunt. Ran’s head turned to Zellara, her eyes half-lidded in raw heat.

“My mouth’s empty. Gimme your tongue.”

Zellara did--a mistake. Ran sucked and moaned into her mouth, reaching one hand between Zellara’s legs. Ran’s fingers pressed hard against her puckered hole. Zellara jerked and squealed into her mouth, nearly cumming on herself.

Maldrag tsk-tsked. She plucked Ran’s wrist off Zellara and placed the mermaid’s hand on her own breast. Ran immediately groped her dark green flesh. Maldrag grinned down at Zellara.

“Come here, you delicate creampuff.”

She hooked her arms under Zellara’s thighs and dragged her down closer to the edge of the bed. Zellara giggled. As soon as Maldrag was standing between her legs, she scooted around so her feet were up and her face was under the half-orc’s purplish-green cunt. Zellara dug her fingers into Maldrag’s firm ass and licked her clit.

She didn’t stop licking as Maldrag lifted her off the bed by her legs. Maldrag rested Zellara’s thighs on her shoulders, crotch in her face, Zellara’s feet locking behind her head. Maldrag went down on her, Zellara moaning into her cunt.

Varani stood up next to Maldrag, getting a good eyeful of their sex as they flipped Ran onto her stomach. Ran slid her hands down between her legs, rubbing her own clit as Varani penetrated her from hole to hole.

Ran bucked and mewled on Varani’s dick. Maldrag caught Varani’s gaze as even as the half-elf was balls deep in Ran’s holes. Maldrag pried her tongue out of Zellara’s tight asshole.

“Yeah?”

“Can I, uh,” Varani pressed their fingers together in a shape like a duckbill.

“Yeah.”

Maldrag bent over the bed, pinning Zellara down under her. Her tongue went back to rawing. Zellara squealed and bucked against her firm, hard muscle, doing everything she could to keep from cumming. She looked at Varani, in the hope that would put a damper on her cresting orgasm.

Instead, she caught Varani’s fingers pushing into Maldrag’s asshole right over her face. They couldn’t look away as Maldrag’s ass swallowed their whole hand. Varani’s swallowed fingers curled into a fist. Maldrag groaned on Zellara.

Zellara whimpered, breaking into a quiver and a sweat as Maldrag bumped against her in time with Varani’s merciless pounding. Maldrag’s clit twitched in Zellara’s mouth. Her girlfriend linked hands with the merfolk. They cried out together.

Zellara lost it. She whined and bucked into Maldrag’s mouth, cumming and cumming into her girlfriend’s powerful suck. She shuddered out the last drop, her body going limp.

Maldrag lowered her onto the bed as gently as she could while taking Varani’s fist. Zellara crawled up to the headboard and leaned back, getting a full, half-lidded view of Varani ramming the other grunting and wheezing Handmaidens. Zellara bit her lip mischievously. She had to cool it for a while, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t help.

“Go, go, Dark Magician Girl!”

The pentagram summoned the shadow succubus directly on top of the bed. Maldrag, Ran, and Varani looked at Zellara, then at the demon with legs and curves for days.

“Magi, you wanna fuck some mortals?”

The demon’s long, shadowy tongue liked her shadow-black lips.

“Guys, you wanna get fucked by a succubus?”

“How is that even a question?” asked Varani.

The others grunted in agreement.

The succubus flew up off the bed, curling into a flip inches under the ceiling, and landed beside Varani. Magi tilted her head to one side, tongue flicking under Varani’s ear. She held a long-nailed hand out in front of her shadow-black cunt. Her clit shifted into a hard, shadowy cock.

Varani giggled shakily as Magi stepped behind them. The succubus spread their cheeks and wet their asshole with her long, writhing tongue. Varani’s breath hitched, but they went back to stuffing Ran’s holes and Maldrag’s ass.

Zellara watched, rapt, as Magi closed the gap between her shadow-black chest and Varani’s lean, sweating back. The succubus held her own cock in one hand. She eased the head up Varani’s tight asshole. Varani grunt turned to a groan, losing control of their speed to the succubus.

The demon was cruel. She reamed Varani, bending them lower and lower over Ran until she had them pressed flat against Ran’s back. Magi slapped Varani’s flank. It was their only warning before she pistoned her dick up their clenching hole. Varani came shrieking inside Ran.

The succubus pulled out of Varani, letting them slide down off the bed to their knees. She turned Varani by the shoulders to face her. Varani leaned in to suck her dick.

Ran and Maldrag looked back, but they needn’t have worried. The succubus raised both long-nailed hands. The nails shrank back as she pressed her fingers together into two duckbilled shapes. 

Ran and Maldrag dropped back onto the bed with a reassured sigh, hands linked. They only pulled their hands apart to stick them between the other’s legs, rubbing each other into the other’s orgasms as the succubus’s pumping fists kept them cumming and cumming and cumming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song credit: My Chemical Romance, Welcome to the Black Parade


	23. The Arson We Choose

Chapter 23: The Arson We Choose

Maldrag

The streets were peaceful except for the distant chorus of hacking coughs and pained groans that filtered out into the cool night from behind Old Korvosa’s trademark thin walls and shoddy windows. Maldrag hated it. The entire city, the entire part of the city she cared about, had up and died on her.

No. It had been murdered. The Queen and her cultists had murdered and were still murdering--it was a long, painful, and drawn out death. Her hands curled to fists, but Maldrag kept on walking. If she took her feelings out on any of these building, whatever poor, sick murder-victim living there would be the one paying.

Not that it was all hopeless. Dhatri, Zellara’s mother’s cleric boyfriend had been doing great work at the temple along with all the other priests. It just wasn’t enough. The cured were too poor to escape the slums, so they just went back to being sick. The number of sick people grew as fast as the number of dead people--for now. Without a cure in sight...the streets were about to get a lot quieter.

By the time Zellara’s house was in sight, Maldrag felt twice as heavy as when she’d left. She plodded through the little garden gate and down the little gravel path hedged with more weeds than garden. She’d meant to start helping out around the house like Zellara.

“Tomorrow,” she muttered, pushing through the door.

It creaked open before she could stop it. Maldrag dropped into a crouch, drawing her Nice-Axe. The slums were quiet, but not even the sickest SOB in Old Korvosa would leave their door unlocked.

The inside of the house was dark--not unexpected. The living room stank of volatile fumes--problem. Tayce, Dhatri, and the kids bagged, gagged, and tied together on wooden chairs at the center of the room--

Praise Desna for creaky floorboards. Maldrag dove behind the sofa at the sound. Two saw-toothed sabres ripped through the cushions.

She raised the handle of her axe just in time to catch the next swing. Maldrag roared. She kicked at the attacker’s knee and shoved the handle against the blade.

The force threw off the attacker. Maldrag jumped up swinging. Nice-Axe drove the next slashing sabre into the floorboards.

The attacker spun in a crimson blur. The other sabre cut a whistling arc toward Maldrag’s neck.

Maldrag jumped back into a guard stance. The sabre’s teeth ripped a bloody gash down her arm.

Red splattered her boots and spread thin over the gassed floor. Better her arm than her neck, but still. Maldrag hefted the greataxe into one hand and took a good, hard look at… 

A gods-damned, motherfucking, Red Mantis assassin sprang at her. 

Maldrag shifted her good hand to the balanced center of her axe. She danced back, fending off the assassin’s saw-toothed flurry with hard flicks of her wrist. Each whack sent spurs of pain up her arm.

An opening.

Maldrag spun the axe handle over the back of her hand. The blade swung between the sabres. It chopped through the eye of the assassin’s mantis-headed mask.

“Cinnabar?”

Cinnabar’s only response was to shove their sabre between Maldrag’s ribs. They yanked it out just as hard, just as fast. The sawing teeth spat thick red chunks onto the floor.

An opening.

Maldrag lunged. Her knee buckled. Her good hand hit the floor, axe clattering. Blood spurted between her teeth.

Cinnabar was going to kill her. And then her girlfriend’s family. So she did the one thing she could think of.

“Stop,” said Maldrag, holding one finger up.

A little tongue of flame leaped up from her fingertip.

“You wouldn’t dare.”

Maldrag mentally apologized and set her finger to the gassed ground. The flame bloomed like a flower only bigger, faster, and deadlier.

Cinnabar sheathed their sabres with a snarl but ran out from the house. Maldrag ignored their ingratitude, seeing as Cinnabar would’ve burned the house and everyone in it anyway, and forced herself to her feet with the rising flames. The fall had coated her in the slick gas.

As she swung her Nice-Axe through the family’s bonds, fire burned up her legs. Maldrag roared and cursed, but she kept on swinging.

The fire blazed to her shoulders. Her clothes burned to ash. She coughed and choked on the smoke, but she didn’t let go. The skin of her fingers melted onto the superheated handle.

Maldrag, wreathed in flames, gave one final swing. The blade half-slashed, half-burned through the ropes. The coughing, choking family leapt free.

Tayce grabbed the kids under her arms. She dashed through the flames to the door.

Maldrag fell to her knees. She couldn’t feel the fires consuming her--they’d burned through her nerves.

Dhatri hooked his sleeved arms under her armpits.

“Get up! Get up!” he screamed as he dragged her as fast as he could.

The wood ceiling groaned over them. It seemed to buckle in slow-motion, the wood swelling as though pregnant. A jagged line ran through the timbers. Thunder cracked.

Maldrag jolted at the sound. She dove backward, throwing herself and Dhatri through the door. The house collapsed on her knees. The world winked out of sight.

\--/--

Searing light pierced through Maldrag’s eyelids. She woke screaming.

“--Maldrag, Maldrag. It’s alright, you’re alright--”

The words drifted in and out of focus as though spoken from a boat circling her position. She was on a cot, barely, in a paper thin shift. She touched the dark green skin of her arms. Her hands jerked away as though burned.

The skin was real. The fire wasn’t.

“--Maldrag, Maldrag--”

Dhatri and Tayce were here in this cramped cell full of daylight. They were alright.

“The kids?”

“The kids are alright.”

“Maldrag, you should lie down. You’re not--”

Maldrag’s knees, bandaged to the size of coconuts, gave out under her. Her palms slammed the stone floor. She grunted, a fresh stab of pain lancing between her ribs.

Dhatri and Tayce helped her back up to the cot.

They’d had nowhere to go but Dhatri’s temple. Even then, only Cleric Dhatri’s presence allowed them to get treated for the burns and Maldrag’s multiple, near-fatal injuries. With bloodveil straining the temple’s resources, however, they couldn’t stay.

“You have to get out of Korvosa,” said Maldrag with holllow finality.

“Can we...can we just see Zellara first?” said Tayce, her voice trembling.

“No. The Queen’s agents will find Zellara. We need to leave, now, before they find us again.”

“But Zellara--”

“I’ve got a trusty messenger.”

“Where can we go?” asked Dhatri. “We’ve never been outside of Korvosa, we have no money--” 

“I make people disappear for a living. You get the kids. Leave the details to me.”

It was true--they had about as many options as a wagon in a dead-end alley. But, Maldrag knew a little Shoanti village about a day’s journey from Korvosa, a place she’d once called home. She just hoped Zellara or one of her demons knew how to read a map.

\--/--

Zellara

Zellara was halfway through reattaching the leg of one of Kroft’s many broken chairs when Kroft herself walked through the door.

“Zellara!”

She left the chair in the hands of her shadow dretches on the balcony and jogged into the living room--the first exercise she’d had all day. The lined worry on Kroft’s face ended it as soon as it began.

“Ok, who died?”

“We don’t know she’s dead.”

All sound sucked out from the room. Zellara’s stomach dropped like a lead ball. Kroft squeezed her shoulder, hard.

“She didn’t show up to work, but wherever she is, she needs you to keep it together. If you can do that, we can go down to the Three Rings. If you can’t--”

“I can,” Zellara rasped. “Let’s go.”

Varani and Ran were already there, as grim-faced as the field marshal. Theandra swung by with a full tray of pints the minute Zellara and Kroft sat. Kroft waved her off with a passing hand, but Theandra plunked the whole tray down.

“On the house,” she said, eyes flicking from the tray to the Handmaidens and back.

Kroft and the Handmaidens gingerly removed the pints. The tray rose up slightly, propped up by a folded paper underneath. Kroft, Varani, and Ran looked at Zellara. 

Zellara held her breath and pulled the paper, papers from under the tray: a letter and a map. She left the map but drew the letter under the table to open it:

How’s my Z girl? Your mom says ‘hi,’ too.  
I don’t know how to tell you this, so I’m just gonna say it.  
Z, the Queen sicced a Red Mantis assassin on us to draw you out. They know. Don’t go to the house--it isn’t there anymore anyway.  
Everyone’s fine, but I’ve got to take them out of the city. You’re gonna have to leave the city, too. If it makes it any easier, I’m gonna be there too, just follow the map.  
Sorry Z. It had to happen like this, I just thought maybe we’d have more time.  
I love you. Your family loves you, too. Come find us. We’ll be waiting for you.  
M

P.S. Cinnabar was the assassin.

Three tears smudged the ink to an illegible black blot before Zellara’s shaking fingers managed to fold it closed. It was probably better that way. Her eyes flicked to the Three Rings’s fireplace, but her hands clutched the inky mess to her chest. When she finally spoke, her voice rasped out in the hoarsest whisper.

“They attacked Maldrag and my family.”

The Queen did it. Cinnabar did it. That, she couldn’t bring herself to say. She couldn’t even raise her eyes from Ran’s hands to the merfolk’s face. Her partner, the missing partner they’d all worried about, sorta, was the one who’d driven the entire Soledad family and Maldrag out of Old Korvosa.

She hoped Maldrag had killed that fucking assassin.

Kroft slammed her pint to the table. The Maidens jumped. Ale sloshed out over the top. She hadn’t taken a single sip.

“I’m gonna go have a word with our Queen.”

All the Maidens stood, holding their arms out toward Kroft and hushing.

“She’ll kill you,” said Ran.

“She’ll kill us because of you,” said Zellara.

“Kroft, sit down, you’re drunk.”

Kroft did not sit. She climbed onto the table and out of the booth. Varani and Zellara grabbed at her clothes.

“Kroft!”

She shook them off.

“I’m not drunk. I’m deathly sober. The Queen tried to kill my best Maiden. She’s not going to stop until you’re all dead, so we might as well get the jump on her while we can and lay down the law. So don’t stop me. This ends tonight.”

Varani didn’t let go of Kroft’s arm. They jumped out of the booth and gave her back a solid pat.

“I’m in.”

Ran scooted out behind them.

“Me too.”

“Wait, wait,” said Zellara, shoving the letter in her pocket and scrambling out from the booth.

Kroft shook her head and held out the map.

“The guards see you? We’re made. That’s it. Justice over. Stay here. Guard the map. That’s our only ticket to Maldrag. If we’re not back in three hours, go find her.”

That stony face was immovable. Zellara wiped her face on the back of her sleeve and took the map.

“Good luck.”

Kroft, Varani, and Ran, left at once to confront the Queen. Without backup. They were gonna get themselves killed.

Zellara shook her head and crawled under the table. The shadows wrapped around her like a second skin. The guards would never see her.


	24. Long Live the Queen

Chapter 24: Long Live the Queen

Varani

Nobody questioned motherfucking Field Marshal Kroft. The plague-masked guards escorted Kroft, Varani, and Ran to the Gray Maidens, who escorted the three outside the throne room to wait for Queen Ileosa. They sat together on the same bench, Varani at the center, a visored Gray Maiden standing on either end.

Security was up these days, and they couldn’t blame the Queen for watching her white ass. She’d been behind the deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands of citizens, not to mention all the experimentation. Only, they were poor, so there hadn’t been any riots outside of the slums. There hadn’t been any complaint at all, until now.

Varani stuffed their hands in their pockets before anyone caught them curling into shaking fists. The Queen had driven Maldrag out of the city. It didn’t matter how she’d done it, but Varani couldn’t stop see blood. If things got ugly in the throne room...no, that was exactly how they wanted things to go.

The two Handmaidens jumped at the sound of a disembodied chime. The Gray Maidens opened the throne room doors wide but didn’t follow the three in, instead closing the doors with a solid thunk behind them.

There was the Crimson Throne, sprawling floor to ceiling with its black spikes between its complimentary crimson curtains. The queen sat on its crimson cushions one leg crossed over the other, visible through the slit of her dark blue gown.

A single, visored Gray Maiden stood by the right arm of the chair. Sabina Merrin--it had to be. Varani hoped that she, too, was seething under that goddamned helm. They’d all been Maidens-in-arms, and Maldrag the best of them.

The queen smiled, freezing all three in their tracks. Her face was as perfectly innocent as an idol’s over a sacrificial altar. A prickling cold weaved down Varani’s spine.

“You said you had good news?”

“We do,” said Kroft, resuming her approach to the throne. “We found Zellara.”

Varani and Ran exchanged a glance behind her back. That was not the plan. That was NOT the fucking plan. They couldn’t take that back, but Kroft kept on stepping.

“That’s wonderful!” said the Queen, clapping her hands. “Where is she?”

“My apartment. She broke in--the little bitch had it in for me.”

Kroft knelt down on the crimson carpet six feet from the Crimson Throne. Varani and Ran hung ten feet behind her, unable to move now that Kroft had gone so far off script that they might have to kill her.

“I caught her, alive. I’d like to ask your permission to kill that traitor to Korvosa, personally.”

The Queen rose from the throne. She sashayed to Kroft, her gown winking open and closed over her long, white legs. She bent just low enough to slip a single finger under Kroft’s chin and lift the field marshal’s gaze to hers.

“My Queen?”

The Queen leaned forward. Her smiling lips brushed Kroft’s.

“You have it.”

“Thanks,” Kroft smiled back.

She yanked the Queen down by the back of the neck and slammed her fist into the Queen’s ribs.

Sabina shrieked bloody murder. She leapt over the throne. Varani and Ran ran to Kroft.

All three fell back as the Queen rose up to her full height, the handle of a dagger sticking out from the blade buried in her heart. Her smiled had vanished, replaced by a look as blank as Sabina’s visor. The Queen’s hand closed around the dagger.

Kroft stumbled back. The Queen caught her by the starched collar of her uniform. All the air sucked out from the room. Varani couldn’t hear a sound as the Queen pulled the dripping dagger out of her heart and sheathed it in Kroft’s.

The Queen dangled the field marshal over the crimson carpet with a single arm. She yanked out the blade with the other. A dark stain spread down through the uniform’s black. It puddled wet but otherwise invisible under the Kroft’s twitching boots.

The Queen held the body until it bled out like a pig’s. She threw it to the courtroom floor when empty. Her hollow eyes zeroed in on Varani and Ran, frozen and staring.

“Whom do you serve?”

“Korvosa,” Varani rasped.

“Then perish.”

Sabina drew her sword. Ran stepped in front of Varani.

“You first.”

The Queen’s eyes glazed over. She ran at Sabina.

Varani yanked Ran’s arm toward the doors.

“Run!”

They ran. Metal pierced flesh with a soft, wet thwick. Varani staggered. A coldness spread up from their under their ribs.

Ran looked back. Time slowed in the space between them. Her eyes widened. Her mouth twisted into a scream. 

Varani could barely hear the sound over the sluggish pulse in their ears. Blood dripped from their mouth onto the length of Sabina’s sword that had pierced through them. Darkness swam at the edge of their vision.

“Go go, Dark Magician Girl!”

A shadow-black blur hurtled past Ran, Varani, and Sabina. Sabina slammed her foot onto Varani’s back and kicked them off her sword. She made it two steps toward the Queen ripping an arm off the shadow succubus.

A second succubus threw themself into Sabina’s back. She hit the floor, grunting and rolling.

Ran pulled Varani’s arms over her shoulders, taking as much of Varani’s weight on her back as she could.

“Stand up! Don’t close your eyes!”

Her words floated back to Varani like echoes down a long tunnel. They braced their feet against the carpet. Their knees collapsed under them. Varani slid.

Ran grabbed their wrists and heaved. She stooped under the weight. Varani’s feet left the ground.

The doors of the throne room pulled open. A squat little halfling wreathed in black shadow waved Ran and Varani through. Zellara slammed the doors shut behind them and laid a hand on Varani’s side.

“I can fix that.”

Cool waves of healing washed over Varani’s otherwise fatal wound. Their vision swam back from black, lighting on the fallen forms of two Gray Maidens, torn to meaty shreds. There was a trail of them down the hall.

“You’ve been busy.”

“How’d you know the talk would go this badly?” asked Ran.

Zellara flushed.

“I didn’t. Somebody saw me.”

Metal boots clattered up the stone stairs. Reinforcements. 

Zellara pulled Varani and Ran into a hug. A skin of shadow wrapped up over them. Gravity whirled out from under them. Varani’s stomach jumped into their throat.

The shadows peeled back at the foot of the staircase. Ran gagged. Gray Maidens clattered to a stop before and behind the three ex-Maidens.

“Z, what the fuck are we doing here?” Varani growled from the corner of their mouth.

“I, uh, ran out of shadow steps for the day,” she gulped.

The Gray Maidens took up a cry and lunged to strike. Varani yanked Ran and Zellara as close to them as they could and stamped the floor.

“Fucking blow--”

A geyser of air exploded up from under them. Varani, Ran, and Zellara flew screaming into the air. The blast knocked the nearest Gray Maidens back. Varani slammed back first into the ceiling. Ribs snapped. All three fell.

Ran screamed. Zellara screamed. Varani kicked their heels.

“Happy thoughts,” they grunted.

They grabbed Ran and Zellara by the back of their shirts and threw them up. The air caught them. 

Varani straightened up, the air solid under their feet. They spat blood down at the Gray Maidens clanking below.

“I gotta message for your Queen--”

The Gray Maidens switched their swords out crossbows. Zellara grabbed Varani and Ran by the wrists and yanked them away.

“Fly, you fools!”

The ex-Maidens ran on solid air, pursued by a hailstorm of crossbow bolts. As they flew out from under the doorway, Varani spun back. They cocked one finger gun at the door.

“Boom.”

A black storm cloud wreathed in jagged lightning crackled up into the doorway. The lightning arced into the tunnel of metal-decked Gray Maidens. Thunder shook the palace and drowned out the screams.

\--/--

Ran

They couldn’t stop flying. There was nowhere left for them in the city. When Varani’s spell gave out, they had no choice but to walk.

Thankfully, they’d made it over the wall of the city. They followed the cold waters of the Jeggare River out past green, rolling farmlands toward the dust brown foothills of the Mindspin Mountains. They trudged along the riverbank, gravel crunching under their boots. 

Ran checked her pocket watch. She raised her hand, not that Varani, reading Maldrag’s map, or Zellara, staring at the rocks, could see.

“I have five minutes before my tail returns.”

Varani folded the map and shoved it into their pocket.

“Right. Looks like we’re camping.”

Zellara skidded to a stop, gravel clattering down the bank.

“Camp--what? We can’t stop! We’re out in the open!”

“The better to see our killers coming--we’ll set a watch, relax.”

Zellara threw up her hands and stomped down to the edge of the river. Varani could only offer Ran a shrug’s worth of explanation. Ran joined Zellara at the riverbank, by necessity.

She shrugged off her clothes, stepped out of her boots, and walked naked into the river. The current was strong, so she kept to the shallows. She sat down on the sand, the water lapping just over her chest. She curled her knees close to her chest.

A webs of tissue stretched out between her shins, wrapping tight around her calves and up over her thighs. A teal shimmer rippled over the tissue binding her legs. As the color spread, the tissue stiffened to sleek, fishlike scales.

Ran leaned back on her hands. The water lapped all the way up her neck to the edge of her jaw. She let her tail stretch out, the large, wide tailfin kicking up over the waves. She looked back over her shoulder.

Varani stood at the top of the bank, the wind blowing their tangled hair into a black cloud over their face. Their hands had curled to tight, shaking fists. Zellara kneeled at the bottom of the bank, her hands cupped under the water. She poured the water onto her face, it drained through her fingers.

Ran ducked under the waves and sighed. They were such unhappy campers. It was as though they’d forgotten that Kroft had died on her feet for the ploy she had chosen. There was not a more honorable death, and death had to come for them all.

Ran turned and drifted back toward the shore. She leaned her elbows on the gravel beside Zellara, the water washing over her forearms.

“Varani, Zellara.”

They looked at her, both tear-stained and miserable.

“We should fuck.”

“Fuck?” Varani blinked.

“How can think about fucking at a time like this?” Zellara half-screamed, half-sobbed.

“Fucking is about not-thinking. Isn’t that exactly what you want right now?”

Ran had them there. They stripped, meditatively, and walked into the water. They stopped on the sandy bank. The river lapped just under Zellara’s crotch.

Ran wrapped her arms around Zellara’s soft waist. Zellara kept her eyes averted but placed her hands on Ran’s head. She guided Ran where to lick and where to suck with the lightest touch.

Varani straddled Ran’s tail. They already knew where and how to touch her. They knew where her tail concealed the lips of her cloaca. They knew how to rub her lips until they opened just enough to squeeze inside.

Varani railed her hard enough that she mewled between Zellara’s legs. Zellara squeaked and knotted her fingers in Ran’s hair just to hang on. That was nothing.

Varani came inside her. They eased out, leaning forward to wrap one arm tight around Ran’s waist. The water lapped under Varani’s pointy chin. They shoved their fist down Ran’s cum-slicked hole.

Ran bucked and wheezed onto Zellara, her tail writhing helplessly under Varani. There was nowhere to go. Varani’s fist tore her spasming walls apart from the tip of their knuckle down to their elbow.

Ran’s shaft clenched down around Varani’s full forearm. Ran wheezed and convulsed. Her wracking body pulsed the river. The cold waves burst up around Zellara and over Varani, trying to drag them down.

Zellara screeched at the shock of cold, cumming into Ran’s mouth. Varani, merciless, only held their breath. They continued to stuff Ran’s tortured shaft, forcing her to cum again and again and again until her palms hit the sandy bed.

Ran’s back arched. Her chest lifted straight up from the water. Ran came with a shriek, pulsing the river. Huge wings of water exploded up around her and Varani. They crashed into the two left in the river.

Varani pulled out to hang onto Ran’s waist with both arms. Ran dug her fists into the sand. The waves tossed her side to side, but they couldn’t unseat her. As soon as they weakened, she swam to shore, Varani on her back.

Zellara had made a small campfire on the riverbank. The three ex-Handmaidens laid out on the gravel under the starry night sky. Neither of them said anything, but Varani’s hand found Ran’s. She smiled quietly and closed her eyes.


End file.
